


Potential

by swimmingfox



Series: Potential [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Biology, Bristol, Chemistry, Comedy, F/M, GCSEs, Honest, Jojen is pretty awesome in this, M/M, Mathematics, Physics, Podrya, UK - Freeform, You might as well learn something, it's a thing, maths - Freeform, sweary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:45:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5847346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swimmingfox/pseuds/swimmingfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arya is a rebellious 16-year old failing her GCSEs. The Head of Casterly Academy in South-West England decides to put her in a mentoring scheme with the dorkiest dork of them all, Podrick Payne. An extremely stupid, quite short Modern AU with a healthy amount of sex-talk and swearing. Hooray!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Trigonometry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bex_xo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bex_xo/gifts), [Lilone1776](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilone1776/gifts), [Jillypups](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/gifts).



> BECAUSE TWO ONGOING FANFICS ARENT ENOUGH.
> 
> So I started a SanSan Modern AU, but then I got carried away with minor Arya/Podrick over on Wolfgirl in Braavos, and thought I'd, you know, get it out of my system. Also, I was encouraged by [paperflowercrowns](http://archiveofourown.org/users/paperflowercrowns/pseuds/paperflowercrowns), who has her own Arya/Podrick one-shot, and JillyPups. So this is my FIRST MODERN AU and I hope you like it. I've been having mega-fun and games. I know Arya and Gendry are like, you know, forevs and all that, but I do like a challenge. It will be shortish, just a few chapters. PODRYA! 
> 
> More notes at the bottom, mostly British-isms, but basics: Arya is 16, and Podrick is 18. Twyin (and Tommen) Lannister are, for pure later plot convenience, no relation to the Baratheons. 
> 
> Warnings for language from the off (whoop!)
> 
> PS Look out for my first picset below. I AM PROUD.

Fuck them. Fuck all of them. Fuck the students, fuck the teachers, fuck this stupid fucking academy and this stupid fucking uniform, and fuck the -

‘Miss Stark.’

‘Fuck. I mean, yes.’ Arya blinked, gave a weird nervous laugh, and looked at Mr. Lannister.

She didn’t think much of many of her teachers. Ms. Tarth (English, Gender Studies) tried to be nice but came off as desperately try-hard. Mr. Baratheon (History) was a pedantic shit with no sense of humour. Mr. Martell (Spanish) just went on about himself all the time and flirted with literally every single student. Mr. Drogo (P.E., somehow still obligatory) was hot but terrifying. Mr. Varys (Geography) was just creepy.

But she had to admit that the head of Casterly Academy was pretty bloody legit. Old-school, but he could still be truly scary. He had skin like leather that had been left out in the Sahara Desert for fifty years. A brown blazer with buttons so brightly gold that they hurt to look at. Right now, he was staring at Arya in a cool, calm way, like he had a gun trained at her under the table.

She sat up a bit straighter. ‘Sorry. What?’

‘Sorry -?’ he left the word dangling, and looked at her as if he was going to press a button that made the floor open up beneath the chair and release her to a pool of deliberately-starved sharks below.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Well, then? What do you have to say for yourself?’ He glanced down at the green leather of his desk, to where the results of her mock-GCSEs sat in all their shitty glory, before looking back at her with those cold, dead-snake eyes.

Arya looked out of the window. ‘Um, I tried, sir?’ She had the knack, along with every single other student in the school and indeed the whole known world, of ending many statements as a question, when most of them were not.

Mr Lannister, on the other hand, was capable of slicing off the end of many an appropriately questioning sentence. ‘Really,' he said, folding his long fingers together. They were a bit like snakeskin, too. ‘You’re choosing to inform me that this is you trying, are you?’

Arya screwed her nose up, and when Mr. Lannister continued to stare at her unblinkingly for what seemed like months, slowly unscrewed it again. Looked at her skirt, which she had already been commanded to roll down to its designed length.

There was a sound from Mr. Lannister’s throat like a storm in a desert fifty thousand miles away. ‘May I remind you, Miss Stark, that I took you on under special circumstances. Even though your last school expelled you, Ms. Tarth said that you had _potential_ -’ he stressed that word in a manner that suggested he both worshipped it and wanted to whip it in a quite brutal S &M sort of way. ‘Potential that I see in absolutely no way as being fulfilled, or even evident. These marks are appalling.’

There wasn’t much to say to that.

He leant back in his chair. ‘I came to this school to improve it,’ he said.

Yeah, brought in by Tory bastard scum, thought Arya.

‘Every single student’s attainment is of the utmost importance to me. If one student fails, then this school fails.’ His words were like light sword-swipes. Arya betted that he loved a bit of S&M. ‘I will not fail.’ He put a little full stop in between each word.

‘Yes, sir,’ Arya said, making whip-noises in her head. _Wh-psssh_.

‘And that’s quite beyond the fact of your possession of marijuana, which I could report you to the police for.’

Except that you won’t, because then your school is done for, thought Arya.

‘You will _not_ bring down the reputation of my school,’ he said, looking like he was trying to decide which parma ham-thin bit of her to slice off first. ‘And so I have decided to take matters into my own hands.’

Shit. Maybe he had a sex dungeon in the cupboard behind the gym changing rooms. She shouldn’t have thought about the whipping. He could probably read her mind.

‘You will of course continue seeing our counsellor for weekly sessions. But I can’t think of a single staff member who would give up their extremely sacred free time to work with someone who is so disdainful of their teaching. However, you may not be aware of our mentoring programme. It’s mostly for rather younger pupils -’ he gave her a chilled glare. ‘But not exclusively. You’ll be paired with an older student who will give you regular extra tutor sessions.’

Please let it be him, thought Arya. Though the tall, blue-eyed god who was Gendry Waters in Year 13 was, if he wasn’t doling out various mind-warping hallucinogens to Year 9s round the back of the car park, always holed up in the D&T department making things out of metal and didn’t seem to be good at anything else.

‘You will retake your exams in four weeks. I expect results, and extremely swift ones, Miss Stark.’ Mr. Lannister’s look made Arya think of a hawk, hovering high in the clouds above a mouse, the moment before it bombs down and tears its guts out. ‘If not, you will face expulsion. And I don’t suppose another school will be very willing to take you.’

He held a piece of paper over the desk, and Arya looked down at the name on it.

***

‘Podrick Payne. I have to be tutored by Podrick fucking Payne.’

Arya was lying on her back between Jojen’s legs at the far end of the field, half in the shade of the fat-skirted fir trees, which was about as far as they could get from the main buildings without being outside. CCTV had been installed around all the main gates so that students making an ill-advised attempt at truancy could be captured on tape by the school’s security creep, Blount. This little patch at the far end of the rugby field, tended to be scattered with fag-ends and the odd condom.

Jojen passed her the joint. ‘Could be worse.’

‘How could it be worse? The guy is a douche.’

Podrick Payne was definitely weird. He rode a moped, which half the time didn’t seem to work because he’d be on it for ages in the car park and then you’d see him waiting for the bus. He was into historical reenactments. He helped the junior Mr. Lannister, the tiny burser, in his _spare time_.

Jojen lay back and adjusted Arya’s head so that it was on his thigh. ‘I’d do him.’

‘You’d do that tree.’ Arya waved the joint with her fingers.

She could feel Jojen lifting his head up a bit to see where she was looking. ‘Not straight enough.’ Not long after they had first met, Jojen had nonchalantly told her that he’d lost his virginity a year and half ago, and he was constantly on the lookout. Unlike her, probably the last person in Year 11 whose hymen was still a No Fly Zone. Although after what had happened at the last school, it wasn’t always first on her bucket list.

Arya blew smoke up into the blank, January sky and passed the joint back.

‘He’s hench,’ said Jojen, in his half-asleep way. ‘Dench.’

‘He is not hench. Or dench. He is just fat.’

‘You just don’t see the potential in people.’

‘Just because you think you’re a fucking mind reader does not mean Podrick Payne is actually some sort of golden god. He has _dick_ in his name. He’ll probably make me suck him off whilst he recites algebra formulas or something.’

‘Mmm,’ said Jojen, as if that was an excellent thing, and they lay there for a bit.

Arya watched the clouds smudge over each other, and wondered why she was so shit at everything. Well, she knew the answer if she stopped to think about it. Her parents were constantly off trying to save the world with their environmental charity and assumed she could do it on her own. Sansa had fucked off to uni. She was bored out of her mind at Aunt Lysa’s and had zilch motivation in getting GCSEs in order to get A-Levels in order to be landed with a debt the size of Cornwall just for the pleasure of going to uni for three years and coming out and failing to get a good job and instead doing a job that you could have done without needing eight A-Cs at GCSE. What was the point?

‘Tory bastards,’ Arya said vaguely to a cloud that looked a bit like David Cameron fucking a dead pig’s mouth.

‘Hello,’ said Jojen, as a shadow fell over both of them.

‘Um, hello?’

Arya opened her eyes to see Tommen Lannister, poshest boy in Year 10, dead cert next year for Head Boy of Main School, looking down at them. Tommen was the headmaster’s grandson, and had been pulled out of his wankerish private school and deposited into this one by Mr. Lannister as a demonstration of his utmost confidence in its upswinging fortunes. He was currently ruby-cheeked, like he’d just been running or had drunk a load of Archer’s and lemonades.

‘Mr. Lannister sent me out to look for you.’ He handed Jojen a message, which Jojen read with his joint propped in the side of his mouth. He handed the message back to Tommen, before holding the joint up to him.

‘Um, no thanks,’ said Tommen, blushing, before turning back towards the school buildings.

Jojen sat up and rolled Arya’s head off his thigh. ‘Keep hold of that for me, would you?’ he said, passing the joint to her. ‘No getting greedy.’ He stood up.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Time for my bollocking now,’ he said, sounding extremely unconcerned, looking distantly across the field and then pointing, with a bit more focus. ‘He is mine.’

Tommen was bending over by a goalmouth with his back to them, tying his shoelace. ‘What, your next mission is to turn little lioncub Tommen?’ said Arya.

‘That boy does not need turning,’ said Jojen, brushing grass off his trousers. ‘In fact, he’s at exactly the perfect angle right now.’ He sloped off, long skinny legs doing that slow bounce that they always did. ‘Tommen, wait up,’ he said, slightly more loudly than normal, before turning round to Arya and flashing her a filthy grin.

***

Tuesday. Arya was walking out of school, thank Allah and Buddha and Krishna and the Beardy God and all the other ones, arguing with Jojen and Pyp over which YouTube video was more hilarious, the one with the tortoise making amazingly human sex noises, or the new singing goat one where they were spliced into R&B songs.

‘Um, Arya?’ Podrick Payne was blocking her escape.

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m Podrick. I’m your mentor? We’re supposed to be meeting now.’ The sixth formers could all wear their own suits, and most people tried to interpret that quite widely, but he was standing there in his cheap black one, slightly too big, looking like the total dork he was. Blushing a bit.

‘Oh. Yeah.’ Arya tried to walk past him, but Jojen was already on the other side of her, the best friend no one wanted at this precise moment.

‘She’s been talking about it all day,’ he said, in his charm-the-pants-off-everyone voice.

Podrick looked insanely pleased. ‘Great. Shall we -?' He was holding a couple of textbooks and a big boxy school laptop. This was probably his wet dream.

‘Fine,’ she said, giving Jojen a death-glare. ‘You are a cunt,’ she said to him, not entirely quietly.

‘That is just about the only thing I’m not,’ he said, and winked.

Arya followed Podrick to the library, a place she didn’t go very often, except to get out the graphic novels occasionally to copy stuff from. It was easier copying from a page than a screen. He seemed to know the library girl well. They probably got awkwardly hot and bothered together over annotated copies of Paradise Lost after hours, except that there was no way that this boy had ever had sex.

She sighed very loudly as he cleared a desk of books, sat down and looked up at her with a sheepishly expectant sort of beam. He had a bit of a beard – only hipsters in the arty bit of Bristol had beards; an eighteen-year-old having one at school was just odd.

She stayed standing. ‘Yeah. You don’t have to do this.’

‘Mr. Lannister said –’

‘Mr. Lannister says a lot of things.’

He looked at the bookshelf next to him and back at her. ‘He was pretty insistent.’

‘Can’t you just _say_ that we’ve done our time? I’ve got places to be.’

He looked down at some papers. ‘I’ve got this form we’re supposed to fill in. You have to tick a box and sign your name.’

She leant over, picked out a pen from the three that he’d lined up in a little row, did a big tick in the box and scrawled her name. ‘There. Done.’

Podrick stared down at the form as if it was now a disease. As if it was AIDS. ‘Um. Maths, right?’

Arya nodded. ‘Yeah. Numbers and shit. I hate them. And science.’

‘They’re not so bad. Once you get to know them.’ There was something sort of hopeful in his look, like a starving puppy dog.

‘Oh _god_ ,’ she said. ‘Fine.’ She sat down. ‘Come on. Introduce me to all your friends.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he said, opening a book.

***

It hadn’t been completely awful. He’d made her do some bollocksy trigonometry and just smiled at her curses. He hadn’t tried to fumble in her pants under the table, though she did notice that his cheeks could go pink in the blink of an eye. _Cos_ he was probably turned on by all that _sin_ , she’d thought with a not entirely silent snigger. She’d looked at her watch so much that after half an hour, he let her go and she’d got the hell out of there.

She didn’t really have anywhere to be. She was living with her aunt Lysa because her house was way nearer to this school, the only one that her parents had convinced into taking Arya, and Lysa was straight-up batshit crazy. Arya mostly spent her hours either with Jojen getting stoned, or holed up in her room drawing.

She was sprawled on her bed, working on a girl who could change into a wolf, a bit Emily Carroll-style, except just in black and red and a bit more angular. A tail just sticking out from a pine tree, and a pool of blood.

There was a knock on her door.

‘No,’ she said.

It opened, and a black-haired boy wearing a Darth Vader cape came in, breathing heavily.

‘Robin, what part of 'no' do you not get? One syllable. Two letters. It means fuck the fuck off.’

Her ten-year old cousin was probably so far along the autistic spectrum he was practically falling off the edge. That or Asperger's. It was the only way to explain him. ‘Why are you drawing cartoons?’ he said.

‘They’re not cartoons, you gimp,’ she said. ‘Darth Vader is dead, you know.’

‘I’m not Darth Vader!’ Robin put a hand on his hip and pouted. ‘I am Kylo Ren and I am your evil overlord.’

‘You’re C3PO.’

Robin screeched in horror. ‘Take that back!’

Arya grinned.

He did a twirl with his cape. ‘Aunt Lysa says dinner is ready.’

Dinner would be spaghetti with crab claws, or pigeon hearts on marmitey toast. She was insane.

‘Not hungry.’

‘You’ll starve and become a skeleton and I’ll make your bones into a percussion instrument to add to my collection, then. I’ll compose rhythms in 5/8 and 7/8 because you are So Irregular.’

‘I’ll get something later. Fuck off.’

Robin danced out of her room, doing little shit beatboxing rhythms.

Arya carried on making her wolf’s head grow. This maths book that Podrick had given her was excellent for leaning on.

***

‘Sorry I’m late.’ Two days later and thirty five minutes into their agreed time, Arya sat down at the table in the library, entirely un-sorry.

Podrick had his books laid out again and the laptop up. ‘Um, right.’ He looked at his watch. ‘So did you manage to do the exercises on page ten?’

‘No. Sorry. Not all of them. By which I mean, none of them.’ There was a tupperware box on the table, too. ‘What’s in there?’ she asked.

He looked across at them as if he hadn’t even noticed them until now. ‘Oh. Nothing. Flapjacks.’

‘Where did you get them from?’ There wasn’t a nice shop for miles. The Year 11s were allowed out at lunchtime on Fridays and clustered round the chip shop getting their grease-mouth on. Along with the laundrette and the garage, that was all the entertainment to be had on King’s Head Lane.

‘I made them.’

‘For me?’

Podrick leant on his elbows and looked at the table. Pink-cheeked. ‘Just - for the lesson. I know it’s not really what you want to be doing.’ A boy who baked. Who rode a dying moped.

‘Awesome,’ said Arya, and opened the lid.

‘So you didn’t do the work yet?’

‘No. Sorry. Got taken up with – other stuff.’ She held a flapjack up and shut one eye at it. Bit down. ‘That’s well good. You should go on Bake-Off.’

He smiled, but not in an entirely happy way. ‘Thanks.’

She widened her eyes at him and carried on munching. Daring him to start on the Pythagoras, willing him not to. ‘I thought of a mnemonic for the trigonometry formulas,’ she said, feeling quite clever just for using both of those words in the same sentence.

He looked hopeful. ‘That’s great.’

‘Sexy Old Whores Can Always Hype Tits Over Arses,’ she said through a mouthful of oats.

He did a tiny, quiet laugh as he leant over his folded arms. ‘’Whores’ doesn’t start with an ‘h’.’ He didn’t blush as much this time. Dammit.

‘I’ll still remember it better than your one.’ She widened her eyes at him and leaned back on her chair, her feet up on the desk.

He scratched his head and glanced at his watch again. ‘Actually, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go. I waited as long as I could.’

Arya suddenly felt a mild sense of disappointment. ‘Are you going to fight in a muddy field?’

He furrowed his eyebrows.

‘Shields. Codpieces.’ She waved an imaginary sword in front of his face.

‘Um, no. I’ve got to go and pick up my uncle.’

‘Oh, ok,’ she said. He actually looked a little hurt over how late she’d been. ‘Sorry about -’ Arya looked down at her books. ‘I’ll try and do it. The work. I’ll give it you for next time?’

It brought his grin back, just about. He had basically the widest smile in history. Even a half-hearted one took over his whole face. ‘If you like.’ He held up his hand in a sort of wave as he rose.

He had left the flapjacks. Arya took another one, bit into it. It was syrupy, and had raisins in, and was really fucking lovely.

***

Arya found her counsellor in his tiny office, with most of him sticking out of the window.

‘Nice arse,’ she said, loudly.

He jerked and banged his head on the window frame. ‘Fuck. Ow.’ With quite a lot of effort, he maneouvered himself back into the room, stubbing his cigarette out on the windowsill as he stood up, practically touching the ceiling, and looking at his watch, irritably. ‘What the hell is this? You were always supposed to be my last slot, so we could wrap up quickly and both get the fuck out of here.’

Quite how Sandor Clegane had ended up being Casterly Academy’s school counsellor Arya had no idea. He had to be the worst psychologist ever. He’d once muttered something about owing the old bastard a favour, or him doing Sandor one, or something. Arya would see boys who were old enough to grow facial hair emerge from his room red-eyed, growls emanating from behind them. But she sort of liked him. She could rant on at him for a bit, and he would stare out of the window and then just generally tell her to shut up and stop whinging like a pathetic little girl, which she didn’t mind too much.

‘I can’t do the later time now,’ she said. ‘I’ve got mentoring.’

Sandor snorted. ‘ _Mentoring_. Who the hell would choose to spend their spare time with you?’

He had a point. Why would anyone do it when they could be off doing their own thing? Why would Podrick?

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I do, so let’s get this over with.’

He let out a big sigh, as raggedy as the cuffs of the only shirt he seemed to possess, and waved a massive hand in her general direction, as if swatting a cloud of flies. ‘Fine. Out with it. Whine away.’

Arya slung her bag down and wheeled herself in a circle on her chair. ‘I’m just – shit. I fucked up my mocks.’

‘Aye, because you did no bloody work.’

‘I just can’t do it.’

‘You don’t try.’

‘I do.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Do.’

They glared at each other. Rather often, their meetings were reduced to pantomime back-and-forths before he slung her out of the door.

‘I’m being tutored by a ‘high-achiever.’’ She dumped her head on her hand and tucked her legs up. ‘Just to make me feel more like a village idiot.’

‘You _are_ a village idiot, the way you’re carrying on. Count yourself lucky you’re not in some shite secondary school where nobody fucking cares.’

‘Yeah, but -’

‘But what? Give me one good reason you’ve got to complain about anything.’

I don’t see my parents, who hate me anyway, she thought. My brothers and sister are all clever and good-looking. I am a short, stupid little squirt. There is no point to anything. She picked at the itchy orange fabric of the seat. ‘It’s demeaning.’

‘ _Demeaning_. Just do as you’re fucking told, you brat. Now go on, give me some peace. I’ve got a lad coming in a sec and I need some shut-eye.’

Arya sighed and picked herself up. He whistled her back so she could sign her form – _he_ didn’t care if they didn’t do the time – and had his arms folded and his eyes shut before she was out of the door.

***

She didn’t go to the next tutor session. Just couldn’t – be arsed. She texted Podrick to say that she was ill, and he sent her a message back saying get well soon. She felt like she was a kid who needed stabilisers or water wings. It wasn’t like she was dyslexic, or had Down’s or something – she was just stupid, and maybe a bit lazy.

‘Ah. Miss Stark.’ Mr. Lannister was passing her on the stairs, hands folded behind his back, probably holding some sort of slim pitchfork or noose.

‘Hi, sir,’ Arya said, with a pretty concerted attempt at perkiness. She could be perky. Almost.

He looked at her with an impassive suspicion. ‘I have been speaking to Podrick Payne.’

Shit. Well, that was that, then. She would be out on her ear, and her parents would disown her, and she would be forced to beg on the streets of Bristol with some sort of shit mime-clown routine, or be a prostitute, or maybe a miming prostitute dressed as a clown.

‘He informs me that the lessons are going well.’

Arya blinked. What? ‘Oh. Yeah. Yes, they are.’

‘Good. I am glad you are pulling your socks up.’ He glared down at her deliberately-torn black tights. ‘Figuratively speaking. Sort those out.’ And he moved up the stairs, tall legs bending like a heron’s stalking through water. Like a killer heron.

Arya stood on the stairs. Maybe Podrick wasn’t quite so bad after all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *****[I DONE MY FIRST EVER PICSET](http://i.imgur.com/veUoGIu.jpg)*****
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  **BRITISH NOTES FOR ALL YOU OTHER WEIRDOS**  
>  For Casterly Academy, I was inspired by [academies and free schools in Britain](https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school/academies), actually set up by the Labour Party but expanded wholeheartedly by the Conservative government. They are state-funded but have the license to teach whatever they want and are often over-subscribed. They are oft-debated in the UK because many have private sponsorship, which heads dangerously close towards education being for profit . Especially when certain organisations and companies who sponsor schools have political or religious agendas. I read an article recently about a school in East London with a demonically-driven headmaster (it looked brilliant, to be honest), who inspired Twyin Lannister a bit. 
> 
> David Cameron (our Prime Minister, Conservative government, also known as the Tories) and the pig. [Truth](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/27/david-cameron-denies-lord-ashcroft-allegations-call-me-dave-dead-pig). 
> 
> GCSEs: Exams studied for in Years 10 and 11, and taken in the summer of Year 11. Often preceded by mock-exams in the winter or spring. Students tend to take between 8-11 GCSEs.
> 
> D&T = Design and Technology
> 
> Maths = math (U.S.). Ours is correct, obviously. Haha.
> 
> Year 10 = aged 14/15 (Tommen’s year; Tommen is 15)  
> Year 11 = 15/16 (Arya and Jojen’s year)  
> Sixth form = Years 12 and 13; some schools have sixth forms attached rather than separate schools, which are called colleges. Still with me?  
> Year 12 = 16/17, lower year of sixth form  
> Year 13 = 17/18 (Podrick and Gendry’s year)
> 
> fag = cigarette
> 
> pants = UNDERWEAR not trousers. Trousers are all outer garments for your legs, smart or casual. Pants can mean a girl's or boy's underwear. I will be using this word a lot.
> 
> FLAPJACKS ARE NOT PANCAKES, YOU BIZARRE PEOPLE. They are made of oats and butter and syrup. Pancakes are PANCAKES.
> 
> Great British Bake-Off is a TV show in which members of the public bake amazing things and get them judged. I don't watch it, but everyone else in Britain does.
> 
> For info, the age of sexual consent in the UK is 16. The drinking age is 18.  
>   
>  **GCSE MATHS LESSON FROM DR SWIMMINGFOX**
> 
> Trignometry = used to collect the lengths of sides and sizes of right-angled triangles.  
> Cos and sin = two of the three formula (the other being tan) involved in trigonometry.  
> SOCHATOA = a way of helping you remember the formulae for trigonometry. (sin = opposite / hypotenuse, cos = adjacent / hypotenuse, tan = opposite / adjacent). The BBC's website suggests Some Old Hag Cracked All Her Teeth On Apples but I prefer Arya's.  
> Pythagoras = theorem for working out the side-lengths of right-angled triangles.
> 
>  **SLANG LESSON FROM DR SWIMMINGFOX**  
>  Hench = fit, buff, good-looking  
> Dench = even more fit, buff, good-looking 
> 
> **YouTube fun** :  
> You didn't know how much you needed [tortoise sex-noises](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKlBjoDWK2I%22) in your life. Until NOW.
> 
>  
> 
>  


	2. Refraction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hmmm, this is a very niche ship. NEVER MIND. It will be about 7 chapters with regular updates - and PICSETS because I have now learnt how to do them (Chapter 1 picset is there now). I don't use tumblr so they are embedded but if anyone wants to post them on their tumblr to spread the Podrya love, then HOORAY.
> 
> IMPORTANT: Flapjacks in Britain are oat-cookie-type things. NOT PANCAKES. And PANTS are UNDERWEAR.

‘Why did you cover for me? With Mr. Lannister? You didn’t have to.’

Arya had felt so guilty that she’d messaged Podrick and re-arranged the last lesson. Had brought her physics book, something she just had to look at before wanting to projectile vomit.

Podrick seemed to be concentrating very hard on turning the pages of her textbook. ‘I thought it would be better.’ He had an incredibly light manner of speaking that meant you couldn’t really tell what he was thinking at all.

‘Thanks.’ She sneaked a look at him over the library table. ‘I wasn’t really ill last time.’

He glanced at her from under his eyebrows, which were so long that they practically hugged each other. ‘I did wonder.’ He looked down at the book again, and this time even she could see that he was trying to hide the crestfallen thing he had going on.

Oh god. Guilt. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll – try and be better. I’m just -’ she thunked her head on her hand. ‘I just find it really hard.’

‘Well, that’s why I’m here,’ he said, quite simply. ‘To make it easier for you.’

She took in a deep breath and opened her bottle of Coke. ‘Let’s do it. Physics me.’

***

‘So how’s it going?’ Jojen asked, two days later. ‘With you and your hench slave master.’ He was covering a chicken wire tube with plaster bandage soaked in muddy green paint.

‘Shut up.’

‘Yeah, fam, is he getting you to wear a white coat and nothing else?’ said Pyp, who was drawing on his arms in biro. ‘Is he doing experiments on you?’

‘Suck my dick.’

Arya had managed an hour this time. A whole hour of prisms and spectrums and electromagnetic other stuff, during which Podrick showed her that Pink Floyd album cover and talked about what would happen if you put your arm in a microwave, which was both gross and awesome. To be honest, he was better than Pycelle, a stuttering, drooling old idiot who’d been teaching in the earlier version of this school for about fifty years and never stopped going on about how much better kids were In His Day.

Now she sat opposite Jojen in the art department, watching him fashion what he said was going to be a homoerotic representation of the Greene Man in 19th-century literature. It just looked like a thin version of the Incredible Hulk standing in pile of shit, though his arse was clearly going to be impressive.

‘So, ready to stay behind after school, and, you know?’ Jojen held up wire-cutters and made a demonstrative gesture.

‘ _Jojen_ , for fuck’s sake. I am not doing him.’

‘Doing who?’ Freya Frey (a slightly annoying girl in her tutor group, one of seven Frey girls in the school), was making a collage using lace trim, felt and mysteriously-sourced locks of human hair.

‘No one,’ Arya said at the same time as Jojen said, ‘Podrick Payne.’

‘You’re such a colossal cock,’ she said to Jojen, who held his hands improbably wide apart. ‘I would only do him if there was literally no one else conscious.’ She tried to ignore the fact that it was ridiculous to be talking about something that she hadn’t done at _all_. Not properly, anyway.

‘I think he’s quite nice,’ said Freya. ‘My grandad once gave him a lift back when his moped had broken down. They talked all the way about types of drawbridges.’

Arya rolled her eyes, a little over-dramatically. That sounded about right.

Ms. Sand (Iranian, engaged in a passionate and not always discreet affair with Mr. Martell), floated by. ‘This is very dramatic work, Jojen. I like the strength in it.’

Jojen gave a foxish, assured nod as he clipped away the excess wire. His mouth had knack of always looking like it had a fag in it even when it didn’t.

Ms. Sand, who specialised in alarmingly sensual watercolours, leant over the desk to look at Arya’s sketchbook. ‘Do not be afraid to show yourself, Arya. Show yourself through these lines.’ She pointed. ‘You are an expressive girl. Very talented.’

‘Thanks, Ms. S.’

‘ _Ellaaaria_ ,’ Ms. Sand said in a voice like a cool Saharan breeze. ‘How many times, my angels,’ she said to the whole class of twelve, ‘must I tell you to call me Ellaria? I am not like these other teachers,’ she said. ‘I am your friend. We make beautiful, powerful art together.’ She left a cloud of intensely woody perfume in her wake as she sauntered to the other end of the classroom.

Jojen pulled off a latex glove with casual relish. ‘He’s warming to me, you know.’ 

‘Who?’

‘Tommen Lannister.’

‘Right.’ She rolled her eyes properly this time.

‘Why do you have to be so _gay_ , bruv? said Pyp, who was making a series of delicately vandalising incisions into the table top.

‘Homophobia is the first sign of insecurity in one’s own, probably gender-fluid sexuality,’ Jojen said, eyeing the gravity-defyingly high curve of his Greene Man’s arse.

‘Fam. Seriously,’ said Pyp, shaking his head.

‘He showed me pictures of his cat on his phone.’ Jojen said to them both, raising his eyebrows a millimetre. ‘He is called Mr. Pounce.’

‘That is because he likes pussy,’ Arya said, before her pen nib snapped and ink spread over the entire page of her work.

***

That next afternoon’s lesson in the physics lab with Podrick built on the last one, though when it began hovering dangerously close to maths, Arya mimed cutting her own throat with the protractor, and slumped her head slowly towards the desk until it was on top of her book. ‘Too many equations.’

‘Sorry,’ Podrick said, quite mildly. ‘What happened to your hand?’

‘Oh.’ She sat up again and turned her fist to look at the massive blank ink stain on her wrist and palm. It was sort of the shape of a squashed India. ‘My pen attacked me in Art, that’s all.’

‘Do you draw a lot?’

Arya nodded. ‘It’s basically the only thing I can do to a non-embarrassing standard.’ She looked at him. ‘Apart from remember the formula for trigonometry.’

He smiled before blinking as if realising something. His eyes were the same colour as that corner of the football field that never got re-turfed. ‘You should do more, then.’

‘Believe me, I would happily do nothing but draw if I had my way.’ And smoke weed. And sleep.

He had stood up and was wandering to the end of the room.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting paper,’ he said.

After an hour, Arya had covered three blank sheets of paper with diagrams – focal rays and parallel rays, concave and convex lenses, and loads of waves. They were still boring physics diagrams, but at least they looked kind of cool. Maybe the colours would help her remember them better. Fuck you, Pycelle.

She looked at her phone. Jojen had, incredibly, WhatsApped her a picture of him next to Tommen on a bus somewhere. Her evening was a vacuum. Vacuum – a physics word! She was basically a whole new Arya. Sort of. ‘So what are you doing now?’ she said, swigging the last, flat dregs of her Coke as Podrick packed his stuff up.

‘I’ve got a fencing lesson,’ he said.

Arya snorted Coke onto her book. ‘Shit. Sorry. What?’

He didn’t even look embarrassed. Just wiped the Coke off with the sleeve of his suit jacket. ‘Fencing. I do it after school on Tuesdays.’

Baking. Moped. Shields. ‘Fencing. That is – wow.’

He was looking at her. ‘It’s good. As near as you get to using a sword in anger. You can – come if you like. We could get chips.’

It was very hard to tell with Podrick what his vibe was when every word he said was so unfussily put. He didn’t seem to be making any sort of creepy move. Just – inviting her to fencing, pure and simple, like no one in the history of the world did, ever.

Arya weighed it up. Another night of having Robin yell tortured father-son lines in her ear whilst she tried to eat Aunt Lysa’s latest kitchen-explosion. She looked at him. ‘What the hell. Let’s do it.’

***

Even though Podrick had his moped parked up in school, he insisted that they get the bus as he didn’t have two helmets. Ayra felt faintly hysterical at the idea of riding behind him anyway. On a _moped_ , which probably wouldn’t start. He sat with his big bag on his lap and his hands folded on top of it.

‘I thought you went to historical reenactments,’ she said. ‘You know, dressing up as a Viking and pretending to rape and pillage.’

‘Not really the last bit,’ he said. ‘Vikings didn’t always do that. But I do fencing more regularly.’ He scratched his neck. ‘Keeps me out of trouble.’

Arya snorted again. Her nose was still burning from the Coke-attack of earlier. ‘What trouble do _you_ get up to?’

He grinned and there was that pink on his cheek again. ‘Not much.’

Fencing happened in the extremely unglamorous setting of a municipal hall in Clifton, under very painfully bright strip lights. Arya put her sunglasses on and sat down on a bench meant for five year-olds.

She looked at her phone again. Jojen kept texting her updates of his ‘progress’ with Tommen. Somehow, he’d managed to tag along to some sort of rugby night. The thought of Jojen and a load of rugby boys was pretty hilarious.

 _i am in hevn_ , Jojen typed.

 _u r in a dreamworld_ , Arya typed back.

_big boiz everywhere_

_lucky u_

_he is so cute, lil TL_

Arya took a picture of herself with her thumb and forefinger curled and touching. _this is how much chance u have_

_he is a bum virgin & i will b his 1st _

_grossssssss_

_where u at_

She held up her phone to take a picture of the mats that had been rolled out, and the few people dressed in white. They looked like utter idiots. Shit, and there was Podrick, you could just tell it was him from his build, and from the sheepish wave he gave her. Jesus.

Jojen sent her a picture of himself, open-mouthed. _WTF._

‘Who is this girl?’

_where the fuck r u_

Arya looked up.

A man, maybe Middle Eastern or something, was looking at her. ‘Yes. You. Who are you?’ He was pointing a sword at her.

‘Me?’ she said. ‘No one.’ That was it exactly. She was no one. ‘I’m just here to watch.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody is here to watch. You are here to fight.’ He made a sound with his mouth like a sword swishing in the air.

Arya let out an extremely short, hysterical giggle. ‘No, it’s really fine.’

He did it again, the swishing noise. Maybe he was Syrian, had come over the Mediterranean in one of the boats. Awesome. She should be nice to him.

Podrick was looking at her – or he probably was, as he was wearing that stupid beekeeper mask thing still.

‘Fine,’ she said, standing up and taking her sunglasses off. ‘I will suck, just so you know.’ Like she sucked at everything. Except the one thing that got her expelled from the last school.

***

‘Ok, that was pretty hilarious,’ said Arya, through a mouthful of chips.

They had come out to drizzle and darkness and gone to the chippie over the road. Syrian-Syrio had made her wear all of the outfit and everything, the one glove and the neck bit, and shouted commands at her whilst she sort of stabbed at Podrick and some other girl, all the while laughing hysterically. Her face was totally hot and damp from being under that mask.

‘What was all that ‘not today’ crap?’ She wiped her ketchuppy fingers on her school skirt as they walked back to the bus stop.

‘It’s just his mantra,’ said Podrick. ‘He has a few of them.’

‘Yeah, I noticed.’ Fight like a cat. Dance like water. The god of death. Maybe that was something they had in Syria. She was actually completely knackered. She didn’t really do exercise.

They were going different ways now. ‘Same time Thursday?’ she said.

“Actually, I can’t. I’ve got to take my uncle to an appointment.’

‘Oh.’ He’d said that before. What was wrong with his uncle?

Arya couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. She had sort of got used to the lessons now. She still hated trigonometry (vile) and coordinates (evil), but the way he was linking things up really helped, and she’d made him laugh a bit by talking about axes (weaponry) instead of axes (coordinates). The more she made him do his shy little laugh, the more he’d hopefully bring flapjacks again.

‘Arse, I’ve got to get my test thing in for Pycelle on Friday.’ She looked up at him. ‘I know you’re just helping me for my mock re-takes, but I was sort of hoping you could help me with it.’

He raised his eyebrows in a surprised, sort of quite-pleased way. They had a life of their own. Like caterpillars trying very, very hard to be butterflies. ‘Um. Sorry.’ He looked quite hard at the bland glow of the streetlight above them. ‘I could come round in the evening, if you like?’ A quick glance. ‘Where do you live?’

In an insane asylum, Arya thought. With C3PO and the Wicked Witch of the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said, and looked at him again. She was fairly sure now that he was not going to stick his tongue in her ear and his hand down her pants. ‘Where do _you_ live?'

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PICSET! LOOK! Also linked [here](http://i.imgur.com/Soe01oX.jpg).
> 
>   
>  **BRITISH NOTES**  
>  'fam' = term of endearment for close friends, as in 'family'  
> bruv = like 'bro.'
> 
> Let me know if there's anything else not obvious!


	3. Waves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Serious thanks to the hardcore crew commenting here - it keeps me chipper!

Podrick lived on the other side of town, two buses and a half-mile extra walk away. It was a bit of a mission in truth, but Arya was intrigued to see where he lived. It was a pretty straightforward semi in a cul-de-sac, except for the two gnomes playing electric guitars in the garden and a Labour Party poster next to a Socialist Worker one in the window.

When he opened the door, Podrick was wearing a dark blue, short-sleeved shirt with little white bits on it and jeans. 

‘Oh,’ said Arya.

‘Hello,’ he said, with half a beam before he looked a bit worried. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. You just look - different.’

He looked down. ‘I don’t wear my uniform all the time.’

‘Yeah, no, I know. I just -’ didn’t ever imagine you in normal clothes, she thought. There were very thin, brown leather bands around his wrist as well. It was like Podrick in another dimension.

As they walked into the hallway, there was a smell like roasted sugar.

‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘What is that smell?’

‘Macaroons.’

‘What - the little colourful ones?’ He nodded, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. ‘Oh my god. How is that even possible?’ A _boy_. Baking macaroons. Fencing. Moped.

He looked completely non-embarrassed, again. ‘My uncle has a sweet tooth.’ Then his mouth inched wider and he leaned down to her a bit. ‘I have a sweet tooth.’ Arya quite liked the way his voice never really changed – he could say ‘I fucked Beyonce last night’ or ‘I murdered the entire Tory front bench’ and it would still be in the same light, unadorned way.

‘So – do you live with him, then?’ she said.

‘Yeah. Do you want to say hello?’

She followed him into the living room, which had an air of terror and doom about it. It was partly the jangling, raw guitars blaring from speakers high up in the corners, and partly the bald man with the jutting jaw sitting in a chair, glaring at her.

‘Hello,’ said Arya, loudly, and waved.

He glared some more, two deep pools of darkness and terror, before jerking his eyes over to Podrick. His face looked like it had sagged on one side. 

‘This is Arya,’ Podrick shouted. ‘Who I was telling you about.’

The man started gesturing violently with his hands, though one hand looked much weaker than the other. Sign language. _Kill her and I will eat her later, after these delicious macaroons_ , probably. Podrick gestured back, hands like a couple of athletic bats, and stepped back to let Arya back out.

‘Is he deaf?’ said Arya in a whisper, before realising that if he was, there was really no point in whispering.

‘No. He had a stroke a while back. Lost the ability to talk. I take him to speech therapy once a week, as he can’t drive now, but I think he just sits there and glares at them all. He used to be a singer once, so he’s taking it pretty hard.’

‘Shit.’ 

There were pictures of various family members, she supposed, on the walls of the staircase as they went up. Two of them had Podrick’s insanely wide grin. ‘Are those your parents?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where are they?’ Maybe Podrick was just like her, and had been relegated to the outskirts of Bristol whilst his folks gallivanted off around the world being extremely worthy.

‘They died. Car crash.’ He opened the door to his room. 

She stopped on the last stair. ‘Fuck. Sorry, Podrick.’

‘It’s ok. I mean, it’s not, but – it was a while ago.’ Another sheepish grin, but one that was a bit more tired behind the eyes.

Arya lingered awkwardly at the door to his room. ‘That really sucks.’ Yeah, nice one. Really meaningful and empathetic. _Empathetic_ – Ms. Tarth would be happy she got that one in.

‘So I came here, and then my uncle had his stroke, so – it’s been keeping me busy.’ He cleared some books off his desk.

It felt very weird, suddenly, being in his room. Intrusive. His bed was neatly made – in fact, everything was pretty neat, apart from a very unruly-looking laundry basket that belched out clothes. His school suit was hanging up in front of the wardrobe. There were posters of a dude in a wig making a rock’n’roll hand sign with the words ‘SCIENCE ROCKS’, and some retro graphic–style ones from Russia or somewhere, including one with a robot. A big bottle of Sprite on the floor.

‘That must be hard,’ she said. ‘I mean, doing your A-Levels and having to look after him as well.’

‘There’s a carer that comes. It’s not just me. But -’ he sat down on his office chair, which spun him to the side a little bit, and looked at Arya, quite simply. ‘I work hard because I want to get out of here. I mean, if I do really well and get to study where I want to study, I’ll be able to eventually earn enough money to look after him better. Or have people look after him better. As well as have a good job.’

‘Yeah. Of course.’

‘And -’ he cleared his throat, a tiny sound. ‘I do the mentoring thing because I’ll get extra UCAS points, and Mr. Lannister said he’d write me a really good reference. So it all helps.’

Arya was feeling worse and worse. A spoilt, useless, lazy brat, just like Sandor had said. She clutched her bag and looked at the floor.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Enough about me. What are you being tested on tomorrow?’

She dug out her book. ‘Death-killer-physics. Or as you call it, sexy-horny-physics. Waves and stuff, mostly. ’

He grinned. ‘Shall I get another chair?’

Arya dumped her bag on the floor. ‘I can just go on there.’ She pointed to the bed. 

He glanced at it as if only just remembering that it was in the room. Seemed to take a second before nodding. ‘I’ll just turn the oven off.’

***

‘Triangles are little fuckers,’ Arya said, forty-five minutes later. ‘Why does everything have to be put in a triangle?’

She was doing another diagram of a wave equation, leaning the book on her knee as she sat cross-legged on the bed. ‘ _Lambda_ ,’ she said, drawing the word out. ‘Sounds like a crap make of car.’ She glanced up at Podrick from under her fringe. It was quite fun making him smile from ear to ear.

He pointed. ‘So why don’t you now have a go at those exercises again?’

She glared at him. ‘No, thank you.’ Spoken quite grandiosely.

‘If you finish that bit, you can have a macaroon.’ He blushed at his own assertiveness.

‘You are a certified bastard,’ she said. ‘Fine. Go and get your fucking macaroons.’

Arya stared at the diagrams after he had gone downstairs. Why didn’t all teachers just bribe them with sugar? It would get everything done. She bashed out a couple of answers, partly using her real-life human brain and not the calculator on her phone. Looked at the poster of the Russian robot again. ‘Yeah, well, you’ve got it easy,’ she said to it, before her eyes fell on his laptop.

Music would help. She got up and pressed a key, and had a quick look. She clicked on a playlist called ‘electronicshit’ and selected something. It seemed pretty hilarious that Podrick would like a track called ‘Buns.’ It was quite bleepy stuff and beats - music for his robot buddy. It was actually quite good. She attacked her work again.

Podrick returned holding a plate of four little macaroons, two pink and two green – Arya had once had them in Bristol, and had basically died of sugar-happiness. She put her hand out and he hid the plate behind his back. 

‘ _Podrick_.’

He smiled. 

She sighed the sort of dramatically heavy sigh that could hopefully crush cars and held out her work. ‘It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.’

He craned his head. ‘It’s not. Just number four. Everything else is right.’

‘Yeah?’

He nodded, and gave her another beam.

She put her hand out. ‘Gimme.’

He held the plate out like a waiter, one hand behind his back, and Arya took the pastel-green one. Bit into it. A crispy, powdery outer part and a sticky gunk inside. But still quite light. ‘That is – fuck.’ she said, still chewing. ‘That is really good, Podrick. Circles are much nicer than triangles.’

He looked ridiculously pleased, and turned the same colour as the other macaroon that she would demolish as soon as she had eaten this one. ‘To be honest, I was always rubbish at cooking,’ he said. ‘But once I moved here, I thought I had better teach myself. There has been quite a lot of trial and error. I once cooked a rabbit the wrong way.’

‘How do you cook it the wrong way?’

He gave her a simple smile. ‘There was fire involved.’

‘Excellent,’ she said, licking her fingers. ‘You know what would go really well with these.’ 

He shook his head.

She grabbed her bag and rifled around at the bottom. ‘ _This_ ,’ she said, pulling out Rizlas and a tiny packet of weed.

He looked at it. ‘Um. You’d have to smoke it out of the window.’

‘ _We_ would have to, you mean.’

She couldn’t really tell what he was thinking. He didn’t seem to mind. ‘If you say so.’

‘I _do_ say so.’

***

‘Brrrr.’

They were standing by the window, taking it in turns to lean out into the cold – well, mostly Arya, having a few draws on the tiny joint she had managed to eek out of Jojen’s leftovers. The back garden comprised a sorry-looking washing-line and a solitary bench. It didn’t look like it was used much, unlike her current residence, where Robin was fashioning a treehouse-come-First Order-headquarters, from where, he kept dramatically insisting, he could ‘rule the world better.’

On one of her turns inside the room, she tipped her head and read the spines of his books. Tons and tons of history and historical fantasy novels with curling lettering on the spines.

‘You’re really into history, then.’ As well as physics and maths and – macaroons.

He shrugged. ‘I just like knowing how the world has been. And my dad got me to learn all the Kings and Queens of England by the time I was about five.’

‘Do you still know them all?’

He nodded, very unselfconsciously.

‘Who was king in -’ she plucked a date out of the air. ‘1653.’

He took about half a second to think about it. ‘No one. It was the Interregnum. You know, after Charles I.’

‘Bollocks.’ Damn him and his ridiculous brain. Futuristic choral music and beats were swirling behind them from his laptop. ‘That music is a bit weird.’

‘Do you not like it?’

‘No, it’s – maybe just not what I normally listen to.’

‘What do you normally listen to?’

She lit her joint again and passed it to him. ‘ I dunno. All sorts.’ She reeled off a few bands and DJs that she liked. 

When he’d first taken the joint from her, he hadn’t seemed fussed. Inhaled. She’d sort of been hoping he would have a coughing fit and look all embarrassed. 

‘Do you normally smoke?’ she said to him.

He shrugged as he handed it back. ‘Once or twice.’ 

‘Will your uncle kill us if he finds out?’ She could imagine him, staring at her from the doorway, his eyes melting her down for scrap metal. 

He shook his head. ‘He was worse than us, back in his day. If he smells it, he’ll probably come and try and nick it.’ He nodded towards her hand, a tiny light in his eye. ‘So you’d better get it down you.’ 

Arya was beginning to think that maybe she had got Podrick all wrong. 

***

She woke up with her face in a pillow. Made several lip-smacking sounds and a string of blurry words, and looked over to see Podrick turning from his laptop at his desk. The music had stopped. 

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘What? Shit.’ Arya wiped her mouth. It was dry and sticky. ‘How long have I been out?’

He looked at his watch. ‘Hours.’ Smiled. ‘About twenty minutes.’ 

The ceiling was on a gentle spin cycle. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’

‘You looked pretty asleep.’

Arya glanced at him. The emphasis had been on the last word, not the one before. Hadn’t it?

He gave her an uncomplicated smile. Yes. _Asleep_. ‘Do you want a lift home?’

‘No, it’s ok,’ she said, beginning to move. God, she had just lain there with her boots on his bed, like a totally rude person. ‘You’re the one doing me the favour teaching me anyway.’

‘It’s a bit of a way though, isn’t it?’ He stood up. ‘I’ve got two helmets.’

***

Podrick’s moped had the appearance of a child who, when it grew up, wanted desperately to be a motorbike. Or the opposite end of life – it wasn’t far away from being an old person’s mobility scooter. Puny, black and grey, and making some quite pathetic coughing sounds. 

Arya and Podrick sat on the moped for quite some time. Podrick kept turning the key and pressed a couple of buttons. Repeatedly.

‘I’ve only just had it fixed.’ He looked sheepish as he half-turned round, his helmet not yet on. ‘It’s not very good.’

Arya, perched on the back and already feeling quite hysterical, let out a snicker, though she had her helmet on and it got muffled by the rubber. ‘I’ll get the bus.’ She started to wriggle off.

‘Just one more go,’ he said, as it jerked forward slightly.

She yelped and grabbed his shoulder and his side to stop herself falling off the back. And laughed some more, uncontrollably. 

‘Sorry,’ he said, braking, and putting his helmet on. ‘Ok. Let’s roll.’ 

Arya had never ridden on a moped, or a motorbike, or even a bike for a really long time. It definitely wasn’t as glamorous as she always imagined a motorbike would be, sitting behind some great big lairy Sons of Anarchy dude with ‘Mom’ tattooed into his neck whilst they hared round some mountainous roads wired on heroin. Instead she sat behind Podrick, going at twenty-five miles an hour through streets of semi-detached houses, the moped puttering as though trying to convey its last words. It probably would have been quicker on the buses.

She had to put her arms round his waist, though. Like, properly touching him. He was dead warm, which was good as this January evening was proper brass monkeys, and sort of soft, and – well, it was fine. He’d made macaroons and smoked a bit of her weed. He wasn’t a total dork.

She just hoped no one would recognise her on this thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PICSET! [Link here](http://i.imgur.com/ImI7cv6.jpg).
> 
>   
>  **HELPFUL BRITISH NOTES**  
>  A-Levels – exams that you take in Year 12 and 13 (16-18 year-olds) after two years of study. You do AS exams in Year 12 and A2s in Year 13. Most students do three or four. Podrick is definitely doing four, that adorable brainbox.
> 
> UCAS points = or UCAS Tariff is a way of calculating grades (A is 60 points, B is 50 etc) for university entry. So to study a particular degree you might need 160 points. You can earn extra points for extracurricular things.
> 
> Rizlas = the main brand of rolling papers/skins in Britain
> 
>  **SLANG LESSON FROM PROFESSOR SWIMMINGFOX** :  
> brass monkeys = slang which I think is used in the USA as well? It means so cold it will freeze your bollocks off :)  
> lairy = rough, bit gross  
>    
>  **SCIENCE & ENGLISH HISTORY LESSON FROM PROFESSOR SWIMMING FOX**  
> Lambda = a wavelength in metres  
> Interregnum = The period between 1649-1660 in England after Charles I’s execution. Oliver Cromwell was the Lord Protector until 1658, and after his son proved not to be as strong a leader, Charles I’s son Charles II was made king and the monarchy re-instated. 
> 
> **PODRICK’S ESOTERIC MUSIC CORNER**  
>  I imagined him listening to [Buns by Plaid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_d-PO3L-9s%0A). Please excuse the video, which is not so cool. 
> 
> _Side note_ : I decided to mix Uncle Ilyn's GoT persona with the actual actor who plays him - more explanation of that to come.


	4. Oscillation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know how I said that Tywin and Tommen Lannister were no relation to the Baratheons? Well, Stannis Baratheon is also no relation to other Baratheons. For reasons entirely of CONVENIENCE. Also, I realise there's quite an OOC character in this one, but I DON'T CARE.

‘Passable.’

Mr. Baratheon (History, permanent frown) was walking up the aisles of the desks at the close of the lesson, handing back papers and giving out one-word death sentences. Arya had spent so much time on science and maths that she’d raced through her essay and probably talked extreme bollocks.

‘Plagiarised.’

She was fairly sure that Mr. Baratheon liked nothing better than kneeling on all fours wearing a dog collar and being led around by some woman in eight-inch high heels in his spare time. People who liked to outwardly demonstrate power often liked to be shouted at and pissed on and all that stuff. She was sure she had read that somewhere.

‘Engaging.’ Jojen took his essay from his half-slouching position and glanced at it without interest. He had the infuriating talent of being both lazy (weed, refusal to use an alarm clock) and really clever (A grades in almost everything, reading Sartre for fun). 

Mr. Baratheon stopped in front of Arya, who was drawing an executed man in her textbook. His severed head lolling in a pool of blood.

‘And that is?’ 

‘Charles I, sir.’ She had looked it up on Wikipedia after Podrick had mentioned him. Long hair, civil war, bit of a shit king. 

There was a miniscule flicker of surprise in Mr. Baratheon’s eyes before they narrowed and he passed her work to her. ‘Acceptable,’ he said and walked on. 

Arya breathed a small sigh of relief. Maybe her brain was beginning to move up a gear, she thought, as _output speed equals input speed divided by gear ratio_ fleeted through her mind from out of nowhere. Maybe it would beat Podrick’s moped, she thought with a snigger.

She was called to Mr. Baratheon’s desk at the end of the lesson.

He eyed her, his face like that bit of Everest that everyone died on, his arms folded. ‘Would you like to tell me why you are defacing your book, which may I remind you is on loan and not for you to willfully damage, with 17th century history when we are covering the Arab-Israeli wars?’

‘More interesting, sir.’ She clutched her folders. ‘Um, can’t we learn about Oliver Cromwell instead?’

He sniffed. ‘No, we cannot. Different exam board.’

Arya turned to go. 

‘Anyway, he was a bloody madman. Almost disrupted the fabric of this country.’ He looked impassively at her, or perhaps through her. ‘There should always be a king on the throne.’

***

Arya’s next lesson with Podrick, (compression and rarefaction, which brought her out in a rash) was back in the library. And he had not brought her any more delectable treats.

‘They were the only thing making me do the work,’ she said, putting on a mock-mopey face.

‘Haven’t had time, sorry,’ said Podrick, smiling. ‘But -’ he glanced at her as she packed up. ‘I was thinking about these waves.’

‘Good for you.’ She raised her eyebrows, but she wasn’t really being mean. 

He knew it, too. Grinned. ‘I’ve been building some stuff at home. It might be helpful. If you fancy coming round again.’

Well, that was a bit mysterious. But it had been far more fun at his house. They couldn’t really play music here, or, more importantly, smoke weed. And he totally hadn’t tried to come onto her, even though she’d been comatose on his bed. Other boys would have – but he’d just let her sleep, which was her second favourite pastime.

She screwed her nose up at him. ‘Only if you make me biscuits.’

***

‘Holy fuck.’ Arya let out a pathetically girly groan. ‘That is just –’ She shut her eyes. ‘Oh my god. Kill me.’

Podrick had outdone himself. He’d met her at the door with an apron on and the deep, velvety smell of warm chocolate and sugar, and not long after that served her up a slice of double-baked chocolate meringue brownie, the sort of thing to make defibrillators shut down just by being near it.

‘It sort of fell in in the middle,’ he said, sounding quite disappointed.

‘It doesn’t matter when it tastes like that,’ she said, staring at her plate. ‘Jesus fucking shitsticks.’ 

They were sitting in the garage, which smelt of wood paint and had a few buckets of rusty tools lying around on their sides. And Podrick’s contraption. He was basically making the world’s nerdiest musical instrument – one you had to know _physics_ for. 

He was explaining that his was called a chaotic noise machine and was a type of modular synth, which seemed to be something people started making in the 1960s. His was in an old suitcase and basically consisted of a board of electrical stuff, inputs and coloured cables. 

‘It’s only small at the moment,’ he said. ‘But it can still make a noise.’

‘So you’ll just keep adding stuff until it takes over your entire garage and then basically can transport you to another dimension?’ she said. 

He laughed, a tiny one, and nodded. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

She would have to make sure her mad little cousin never saw anything like this. He would piss his pants with delight.

‘So – what does it do, then?’

He connected one little grey wire diagonally into two sockets. ‘This is a sawtooth wave.’ It made a sound like a flat-lining robot. And then he put one end of the wire into a different socket. ‘This is a square wave.’ It made a sound like a slightly more panicked flat-lining robot.

Arya burst out laughing. He looked a bit embarrassed. ‘No, sorry,’ she said. ‘I mean – I thought it was going to sound like some of the stuff we were listening to the other day.’ She let out another inane, bubbling giggle.

Podrick let her, but started talking about resonance and frequency cut-offs, and she began to see where he was going, and her giggles slowly got chopped into sighs, before she started asking questions and getting him to move stuff around.

It was pretty cold in here. Today he seemed to be in some sort of Christmas hoodie. She had to admit that he didn’t look un-cute in it, with his hood up, crossing a pink wire over a red one and then moving a little dial that changed the oscillation. 

By the time she had finished her third piece of chocolate-heart-attack, she was working the synth on her own, and while he kept reminding her how the waves were transforming and stuff about voltage, she was just getting into making the sounds herself and imagining she was driving some sort of futuristic space moped.

‘That is cool, Podrick. Seriously, you should really be teaching physics. I could kill Pycelle for you if you like.’

He blushed. There was a tiny bit of chocolate at the side of his lip.

‘I feel a bit sick,’ she said. ‘Can we have a cup of tea?’

***

They sat in the kitchen. Dark, stabbing death-power chords were emanating from the living room. Uncle Ilyn seemed to like listening to music, very loudly, all the time.

Arya blew on the surface of her tea, which she had dumped three heaped teaspoons of sugar into. ‘How come you’re so good at everything, Podrick?’

‘I just like learning things. But I’m not.’ He looked up from his tea. ‘Good at everything.’

‘Name me one thing you’re not good at,’ she said, bringing her feet up onto the chair.

He put both hands round his mug. ‘Football. Bit crap at that. Languages.’ He gave her a sheepish look. ‘Vehicle maintenance.’

She grinned. ‘That one I’ll give you. Your moped is well dodgy.’

He scratched the back of his head and looked out of the window, his grin only getting wider and more sheepish. ‘Yeah. I had to take it back to the garage again. Can’t take you back today.’

‘That’s cool. Better than being on that deathtrap anyway,’ she said, quite dramatically, trying to ignore the very mild sense of disappointment that she wouldn’t get to sit behind Podrick again.

***

Arya found Jojen with his sister in the heated courtyard of the Highbury Vaults, a historic pub where once prisoners could enjoy their last meal before they were taken away to be hanged, and where now plants hung down from a vertical garden and sixteen-year olds could merrily sneak offie-bought rum into their Coke.

Arya had stayed behind in the art department – where Ms. Sand had been blasting loud salsa music and swaying with inappropriate hip-movements – before meeting them in town for semi-illegal drinking. Meera and Jojen had been to the funeral of a not-too-close relative and Jojen had demanded Arya join them to drown their admittedly not-terribly-heavy sorrows.

‘Meera is extolling the wonders of her new boyfriend,’ Jojen said to her, fag jammed in mouth, as Arya sat down. He was wearing the skinniest suit possible, and his black tie was about as wide as her little finger.

Meera was a year older than Sansa, studying marine biology at Newcastle. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, had a tattoo of a fish on the inside of her wrist and had a way of being interested in everyone and interesting about everything. She cupped a hand round her bottle of strawberry beer and leant her shoulder forward, conspiratorially. ‘He is very serious about his course, has to go on all these leadership expeditions and management exchanges, and he’s maybe a bit too serious in general, but -’ she put a hand on top of Jojen’s and fixed her eyes on Arya. ‘Sorry brother, but he is very good in bed.’

‘I don’t know why you’re apologising,’ said Jojen, half-heartedly. Meera was already scrolling through her phone to find a picture of him. 

Everybody was always hooking up. It’s what they did. And Arya – well, it wasn’t like she totally even wanted to, a lot of the time. She couldn’t even imagine it, someone’s dick in you. What did that even _feel_ like? No amount of watching porn could tell you, and anyway, she wasn’t sure she believed the permanent look of surprise on some of those girls’ faces. Ugh.

Meera turned her phone round to show Arya a photo of her amazing-if-serious new lover. They had maybe gone skiing somewhere – sheer white mountains in the background. Dark curls and pale skin. He basically looked the same as Meera, except way more doleful, like a limping, month-old puppy that really wanted a doggy biscuit.

‘Fit,’ said Arya.

‘Double fit,’ said Jojen, lazily.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ said his sister. ‘He is always trying to steal my boyfriends,’ she said to Arya. 

‘Not at the moment,’ said Jojen. ‘I have other fish to fry.’

‘Other arse to chase, you mean,’ said Arya.

Meera watched the two of them with her cheek propped on her hand. ‘What have I missed?’

‘Your brother has set himself the ultimate challenge,’ Arya told her. Jojen just stubbed out his cigarette on the table with a long, lean grin. ‘To fuck the headmaster’s grandson.’

Meera shook her head. ‘Nice, Jojen. You always manage to up your game.’

Jojen did a laconic little wave-bow with his hand, the way the Queen would, and his swamp-dark eyes settled on Arya. Super-assured. ‘I’m going to take Tommen to the dance.’ They lost their focus a little and wandered past her ear. ‘Or _at_ the dance.’

The sixth formers were organising a charity ball at school for Years 10 to 13 to raise money for the Calais Jungle. There was normally only one carnage-filled event at the end of the year for school-leavers, but Mr. Lannister had somehow given his permission for this one.

‘If you take Tommen to the dance, I will eat my pants,’ said Arya. ‘I will eat _your_ pants. Your cum-encrusted pants.’

Jojen slowly leant backwards until his shoulder blades met the wall, which was some distance away, a faintly triumphant smile on his face. ‘We are going to see a film tomorrow.’

Shit. Things had moved on without her realising. ‘Which one?’

‘Hunger Games. The fifth one.’ He rolled his eyes. 

Crap. He really was going all out with this one. Jojen enjoyed educating Arya in the ways of cinema, making her watch Kurosawa (quite cool, lots of fighting), Michael Haneke (twisted as fuck, French) or Derek Jarman (baffling, especially when the screen was entirely blue for the whole film). 

‘We will have a cheeky Nando’s and top bants,’ he said, in a studiedly flat tone, but with a slight curve at one side of his mouth.

This was a boy who could talk for a whole evening on the pagan punk aesthetic and new queer cinema. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ said Arya.

He laughed, though a Jojen-laugh was like a breeze touching one leaf, before leaning forward again. ‘How’s your brother? The one with the leg.’

‘Same.’ Her parents were taking Bran to a specialist in Switzerland on their way to a conference on global warming. Another reason why it was better to have her the hell out of the way. 

‘Anyway, Arya, what about you?’ said Meera, pushing her sleeves up and looking warmly at her.

‘What about me?’

‘Boyfriends. Inappropriate conquest ambitions.’

Arya scrunched up her mouth. ‘Nah.’ Jojen was watching her with that knowing, almost-smile, like he always did, his I-can-see-the-fucking-future face. ‘What?’ she said, giving him wide, dead eyes.

He raised his eyebrows a millimetre and shook his head, before gathering up their glasses. ‘Another round, I think.’

***

Three more cokes with generous lashings of rum, and Arya had just run for a bus before copiously and imaginatively cursing as it pulled off without her. The next bus towards home wasn’t for half an hour.

She leant against the frame of the bus stop and scrolled through her phone as a big, sleek car went past, barely registering that it had slowed down, due to her engrossment in her older brother’s latest travelling-round-the-world photos. He was currently doing labour work in Australia with his idiot friend Theon, and they both looked stupidly tanned and happy. Bastards.

A low, furred engine noise. That car had turned round and was coming back, getting slower again as it came towards her. Shit. There was no one around. Arya wondered where her compass was so she could jab it into the cock of any potential flasher who jumped out.

The window wound down. ‘Oh, my god, look who it is.’ A girl, leaning forward, ringlets of blonde hair. 

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Arya as the girl got out and stood there, her arms folded. 

Myrcella, the fourteen year-old little rich bitch from King’s Landing School, total spoilt brat. They had fucking _drivers_ , for fuck’s sake, thought Arya, as a big, blunt-nosed man got out of the car. He actually looked a bit scary.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ Arya said.

She knew exactly what Myrcella wanted. To humiliate Arya for what she had done to Joffrey.

It hadn’t been entirely her fault. There’d been a house party, quite a lot of cheap Ukranian vodka, and Joffrey Baratheon had bet her one hundred quid that she wouldn’t give him a blowjob. 

Myrcella just looked her up and down, slowly and deliberately. ‘My brother still can’t play tennis, you know. He can’t even write with that arm.’

‘He can’t _wank_ with that arm, you mean.’

The next day, when she woke up to find that Joffrey had not only taken a picture on his phone of her doing it but put it online under the title of ‘worst blowjob ever’, where it had already had 357 likes, she had stalked into his geography class with a cricket bat nicked from the PE department and smashed it onto his hand. Three times. Cue expulsion from the school, parental anguish, and Casterly Bloody Academy.

‘Oh my god, listen to you,’ Myrcella said, as if she was addressing a fawning audience. ‘You’ve ruined his career.’

‘His _career_. Yeah, like he was going to be Andy fucking Murray.’

Joffrey’s Botox-addicted mother had threatened to sue her, until Arya had pointed out that his tennis-playing career was already over, because he had posted the pictures from his own Instagram account and because, as it turned out, she wasn’t the only girl who had been bribed into it. The tabloid papers quite liked that sort of thing and would eat him alive, if he ever got that far. He’d already been banned from the tennis club.

‘You’re such a bitch,’ said Myrcella, stepping forward.

‘You’re a stuck-up little whore.’

‘She bothering you, ‘Cella?’ said the big lug in the shoulder-padded suit in a ridiculously broad West Country accent.

‘Yeah, Meryn. She is, actually.’

He stepped forward, and the closeness seemed to add another few inches to his height. Arya wished to God there was a 999 app where you could just press a button and get the police here. Instead, she just did what she did best. Or worst.

‘Seriously?’ she said, looking him up and down, and at the same time trying to decide best where to leg it. ‘This is your muscle? He looks like the Thing after too many nights on the beers.’

‘You’d better watch your mouth,’ he said, quite slowly. A cow chewing cud.

A motorbike went past. No – a _moped_. Fuck. Before Arya had time to yell his name, Podrick had slowed, and stopped just behind the car.

He was already removing his helmet as he got off his moped. ‘Hey Arya,’ he said, walking closer, seeming to take careful, assessing glances at her company. 

‘Is this your boyfriend?’ Myrcella said in a lilting, candy-coloured voice.

‘No.’ Arya tried to tell Podrick with her eyes that she was in a bit of trouble. He looked completely impassive. 

‘You have to be careful with her,’ said Myrcella, doing a really bad attempt at being a sexy sort of Catwoman. ‘She’ll basically rape you with her mouth and then commit GBH.’

‘Fuck you.’ Arya felt the same blotting, blank rage she’d felt that morning, took a step closer and raised her hand. The big guy lunged and caught her wrist. Force, mass and acceleration. ‘Get off me,’ she said, wriggling to absolutely no effect. His grip was like the appendage of some sort of roadside maintenance vehicle. 

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said Podrick in his normal voice.

‘Or what?’ said the guy. ‘Some little prick on a moped will beat me up?’ 

His grip tightened on Arya’s wrist, and her skin twisted. ‘Ow. Fuck.’ 

‘Not exactly,’ said Podrick, and over the course of about one second, had hit him with a swift chopping motion on the arm so that he let go of Arya, who staggered away, before locking a leg around the back of one of the guy’s, moving his knee and falling with him to the ground, his arm round his neck.

Myrcella and Arya stared down at them both, open-mouthed. Another car slowed down as it passed.

Podrick’s necklock seemed very restrictive. The guy kept moving his legs, an awkward scuffling, but by now, Podrick was half-sitting on him. The guy went limp. ‘Alright, you’ve made your point,’ he said, half-muffled by Podrick’s arm.

Podrick stood up and the guy got to his feet. 

‘You’re supposed to be my _bodyguard_ ,’ said Myrcella, as they walked back to the car.

‘I’m your driver, love, not Hulk Hogan,’ he said, slamming the door after she’d got in. The car hardly made a sound as it pulled away.

Arya was still staring at Podrick. ‘Are you hurt?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ He glanced at her wrist. ‘Are you ok?’

It was burning, but she wasn’t really noticing. ‘How did you –’

‘Judo,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come from my lesson.’ He stared after the car, whose lights blinked as they turned a further corner. ‘Never performed it on a real person before.’

The alcohol was winding slowly out of Arya’s system. She felt very sober indeed. And quite astonished. ‘That’s not what happened. What – what she said.’

‘It’s none of my business,’ said Podrick. ‘Do you want a lift home?’

She looked over at his moped. ‘Is it working today?’

‘So far,’ he said, with very mild cheeriness, before his eyes flicked downwards. ‘You’ve, um, got paint on you.’

Arya grazed a fingernail on the outside of her eye until the little flake of blue paint came away, and followed him to the moped, not saying another word. She only realised that he had given her his one helmet when they were halfway home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PICSET! Linkable [here](http://i.imgur.com/om6P10k.jpg).
> 
> ** HELPFUL BRITISH NOTES AND SLANG **
> 
> dodgy = substandard, cheap, low-grade. Can also mean dishonest. Pretty similar to ‘shady’ (U.S.).
> 
> garage = when Podrick says he has to take his moped back to the garage, he means the car-fixing place. We call the places where we keep our cars next to the house garages, and also the places where we put petrol in our cars garages, and also often the places where cars are fixed garages. Helpfully.
> 
> Calais Jungle = the nickname for the large refugee camp in Calais, near the Eurotunnel where refugees hope to come to England. 
> 
> offie = off-license, or liquor store
> 
> wank = to masturbate; ah, the joy of being a Brit.
> 
> Cheeky Nando’s and top bants = this is basically a defining part of young Britishness. If you can understand this one, we’ll let you in the country. Not really. It’s a bit of a tricky one to explain. Nando’s is a mid-range popular family chicken restaurant chain. Bants means banter, which means sparky back-and-forth conversation between good pals. The idea is that a certain sort of group of boys (middle-class, sort of straight-ahead) will say to each other that they will go for a cheeky Nando’s and have top bants. This means they will go eat chicken at Nando’s and have a good laugh together. But it has sort of become a huge meme and taken on a life of its own. Jojen is using it ironically, but it’s the sort of thing that Tommen and his lame posho rugby pals would say genuinely. 
> 
> Pretty hilarious explanations [here!](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cheeky+Nandos) and [here!](http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/going-to-westfield-with-the-archbishop-of-banterbury)


	5. Pollination

Arya and Jojen were in their usual spot, freezing their arses off under the fir trees, when Missandei came wandering up. She was in Year 12, and had the incredible, most would say unique, knack of being both a total swot and super-cool and sexy. She had got GCSEs in five specialist languages including Japanese and Punjabi before she was fifteen, and otherwise spoke in an airy, velveteen tone that made every single straight boy in the school weak at the knees.

But she wasn’t in the habit of talking to Arya and Jojen. 

‘Just wondering if you might have any weed going spare, Jojen,’ she said, kneeling down next to him.

Jojen smiled amicably. ‘’Course.’ He was very generous with it. You only had to ask, though it was generally better if you were a cute, wet-behind-the-ears junior schoolboy. Still, most didn’t stick around.

‘Safe,’ said Missy, folding her legs to the side as she took his joint, sighing up at the winter blueness. ‘This sky, man.’

They all looked at it for a bit. Four-fifths nitrogen, one-fifth oxygen, thought Arya. Carbon dioxide, water vapour.

She looked at her watch from her prostrate position. ‘Got to go.’ Noble gases – that was the other bit to do with atmosphere. She pictured those as swanning around with fancy medieval hats on their heads bowing to each other.

‘Podrick time?’ said Jojen.

‘Yup.’ She began to sit up. Actually, she had loads of time, and was going to his house anyway, but she didn’t want to be late. 

‘Podrick Payne?’ Missy sat up.

‘Yeah,’ said Arya, thinking, don’t take the piss. You don’t know him. He was making her think of science things in her sleep, and he had basically saved her life. With judo.

But Missy did something quite different. She clapped a hand dramatically to her chest, splaying her perfect purple-tipped false nails, closed her eyes, and said ‘oh my days,’ in a voice even more breathy than normal.

Arya and Jojen looked at each other. ‘What?’ said Arya.

‘That boy,’ said Missy, opening her eyes. ‘Is delightful.’ And she uttered his name again, as if she was saying ‘Chris Helmsworth,’ or ‘Tom Hardy.’

‘Seriously?’ Arya felt very weird suddenly. It was probably the weed. ‘How do you know?’

Missy leaned back with a feathery sigh. ‘He once took me home after my phone died and I couldn’t get an Uber. I was a little bit tipsy, but he was very charming. I thought I’d, you know, say a special thank you back at mine.’ She looked at Arya very seriously. ‘Trust me, that is a man who knows what he is doing.’

Podrick. She was talking about Podrick. ‘I thought maybe he was –’

‘A virgin? No, Arya, he was not a virgin. That or he watches a lot of feminist porn.’ She pulled her coat around her with another dreamy exhalation of breath. ‘It was like going to a very sexy spa. But not a word, yeah? I’m with Grey now, and he is a little bit possessive.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Might get a bit of penis envy.’

***

They hadn’t really covered much biology in the tutor sessions. And now, in his room and with perfect timing, Podrick turned the page of Arya’s textbook and started telling her about pollination. And the worst thing was that he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit embarrassed to talk about plant sex.

‘So I suppose you just need to remember the differences between wind-pollination and insect pollination,’ he was saying. 

Arya stared at the diagram. The long, conical stamen of the grass blade. The anthers of the flowers that nestled in the petals, waiting to brush against insects, like a crap come-on. The bloody _ovaries_.

‘And maybe remembering that gametes refers to both male and female reproductive cells. So male gamete means sperm and female gamete means the ovary.’

Jesus Christ. Her face was going red. Arya and Jojen could talk about sex and dicks and handjobs and blowjobs and soapy titwanks and cumshots for hours and now here they were just talking about plants and her face was going red.

It was Missy’s fault. She had made everything weird. Totally weird. Arya had not really imagined Podrick having much – _any_ – action, and now it turned out that he was some kind of super-lover. 

‘And there’ll be stuff about asexual reproduction versus sexual reproduction.’

Missy. The most beautiful girl in the school. Arya supposed that her colossal brain, perfectly tucked into her beautiful skull, probably made her more attractive to Podrick. Unlike her, the Year 11 who managed to be both a short-arse and a dumbass. 

Podrick was looking at her.

‘Sorry, what?’ she said. The thing that she had heard him say was something about sticky pollen.

‘I was just saying it’s probably helpful to draw them,’ he said. ‘The flowers. You seem to remember stuff better that way.’

Drawing things that secreted nectar. The ovule that was basically a vagina. The stigma that curved upwards with the outrageous-looking tips. ‘Um,’ said Arya, scratching her nose and putting her pen as far away as possible from her.

Podrick looked at her. His face was utterly open. 

‘Could I have a go on your synth again?’ she said. 

***

Podrick had connected his modular synth – or _Podular_ synth, as Arya had decided to call it – to a tiny keyboard, and Arya was playing it like a boss. To be honest, she just liked making all the noises. It wasn’t anything to do with her revision. And it was a relief to be in the faintly tar-smelling chill of the garage and out of his room. She had probably gone back to her normal colour again now. Hopefully.

‘There’s a gig happening in town in a few days I was going to go to,’ said Podrick. 

‘Cool,’ said Arya, moving the blue wire over to the VCA input again, trying not to think about him licking Missy like a lollipop with loads of candles everywhere. Was that what they did in feminist porn? She would have to check.

‘It’s a modular synth thing. A couple of different bands.’

‘Cool,’ she said, imagining rose petals falling down from the ceiling and maybe a violin playing in the corner. Missy’s revelation had made her very confused. _That boy is delightful_.

‘It’s on Thursday.’

‘Cool.’

‘Um, I didn’t know if you wanted to come?’

She stopped her depressed-BB8 noises and looked at him. ‘Yeah? I mean, do you want me to?’

He shrugged and looked at the synth. ‘I thought you might like it. I mean, to see how it’s done properly.’ His eyes snuck up to hers again. 

‘Cool,’ said Arya, for about the twenty-fifth time.

***

She sat on the kitchen top with a cup of tea looking at Podrick’s phone. She didn’t dare go into the living room, because DeathLord Uncle Ilyn was in there, and Podrick was filling out some NHS forms with him.

He’d left her with a video of a load of totally gimpish-looking men in various historical uniforms running around with spears. It was pretty hilarious. She wondered what Mr. Baratheon would think of it. Not much, probably.

It wasn’t a date. Podrick had definitely not just asked her out on a date. He was so unembarrassed about the raging plant-orgies. And yet he’d made Missy – well, frankly she had no idea what he had made Missy do, or feel. But, Arya told herself again, she wasn’t Missy. She was Podrick’s charity case, his get-out-of-Bristol-suburbs-free-card. Ok, that was a bit mean. But it was probably just a sort of study session outing, a field trip – except with beer, hopefully. That was totally fine.

Podrick came back in. ‘Sorry.’

Arya didn’t know what he was apologising for. She had totally outstayed her welcome as it was. She looked up from his phone, from which emanated tiny roars and metallic sounds. ‘You don’t care what anyone thinks of you, do you?’

He looked a bit flummoxed. ‘Don’t I?’

‘I mean, you just do the things that you’re interested in. Modular synths and fencing and fighting in fields.’ And expert sex with hot girls. 

‘I guess. Don’t you?’

I need more hobbies, thought Arya. And some expert sex. ‘Just the drawing.’

He put his hands behind him against the kitchen top. ‘Do you have any with you?’

‘No,’ said Arya, picturing the thick notepad in the bottom of her bag. 

‘I’d like to see some,’ he said, in that same, ridiculously understated way of his.

‘Would you? Why?’

His eyebrows and his shoulders went up. ‘Because it’s what you’re into.’

Arya uncrossed her legs. ‘Um, Podrick. Thanks again for the other night.’ For laying waste to that big barn door and saving her dignity.

‘That’s ok.’

‘I’m not very good at – anger management sometimes.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, lightly. He glanced at her, tucking his hands underneath his arms. ‘You just need to learn judo.’

‘Or fencing.’

A little smile. ‘Or fencing.’ 

Loud music had begun smashing itself up in the next room. Uncle Ilyn had put on another record.

Arya look down at Podrick’s phone. It had moved onto another video. 

He leant over. She tried not to look at his neck. ‘That one’s based on a battle that William Wallace fought in,’ he said.

‘Oh, Braveheart stuff?’ Vague memories of Mel Gibson and blue mud on his cheeks.

A fleeting look of pain passed over Podrick’s face, like someone had just prodded him. ‘That film wasn’t very accurate.’

She peered a bit closer. ‘Which one is you?’

He pointed. ‘In the kilt.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Arya felt her cheeks go red again. Goddammit.

***

‘Aryyyyaaaahhhh.’

‘Hey, sis.’

Sansa was on Skype, blowing kisses towards the screen but also checking her phone. ‘How is crazy Aunt Lysa?’

Arya was doodling figures around the page-edges of her hydrocarbons chapter, her chin propped on one hand. ‘I went into the bathroom and there was milk in the bath. Milk. Like, loads of it. She must have bought about twenty one-litre bottles.’

‘What, like Cleopatra?’

‘If Cleopatra cries a lot and trolls on Mumsnet. Also, she’s got back into that spiritual stuff.’ Lysa managed to veer wildly between darkly jabbing paranoia and an eerie, cod-zen calm, mostly spurred on by her current choice of reading material, ‘The Eleven Karmic Spaces: Choosing Freedom from the Patterns That Bind You.’ 

‘Oh my god. Rather you than me.’ Of course it was. Their parents would have never punished Sansa by sending her to live with the 21st-century Mrs Rochester (another pleased look from Ms. Tarth). But then Sansa would never have broken someone’s fingers.

Now her sister wasn’t even trying to look sympathetic. She was tossing her hair over the front of her face and throwing it back again, and then combing it through her fingers, even though it already looked like a show dog from the pastoral category at Crufts. ‘What are you up to in your hidey-hole?’

Arya held up her GCSE Chemistry textbook. ‘Working.’

Sansa’s face loomed closer to the screen. ‘Arrrr-ya, that is awesome! You’re working!’ She said it with the same pleased astonishment that she might have said ‘you’ve become a prize-winning trapeze artist!’ or ‘you’ve grown five inches taller!’

‘Shut up.’

‘No, I’m just proud of you. Honest.’

I’ve had help, Arya thought, as she pulled over her sketchbook in order to draw better. Fencing, macaroon-baking, modular-synth-making, judo-slaying help. 

‘Wait -’ Sansa narrowed her eyes, put her hands together under her chin like she was a thoughtful Japanese guru. ‘Who are you trying to impress?’ Her expression changed to mock-nanny. ‘Are you shagging one of your teachers?’

Arya thought of Qyburn (biology and chemistry, trod a carefully selected path between beatific and sinister, very keen on dissection), and shuddered. ‘No. No one. Anyway, speak for yourself. _You’re_ the one fucking your teacher.’ Sansa had announced the news that she had started sleeping with her Politics and Philosophy lecturer, Dr Baelish, over WhatsApp with lots of flower and heart emojis.

Sansa sighed, melodramatically and happily. ‘We _make love_. And he’s my _lecturer_. It’s different in academia, Arya, you’ll see when you start. We’re all on the same level. It’s more -’ she waved her fingers in the air. ‘Mature, you know? More _adult_.’

I bet he fucks you over his desk and makes you call him big boy, Arya thought. She had looked him up on the LSE website and he had looked like a total sleazebag.

‘Anyway,’ said Sansa. ‘I’ve got to go. Petyr’s taking me to Bruges for the weekend. We’re going to go through Brussels to look at the European Parliament. Don’t tell Mum and Dad.’ She gave a large, but slightly worried, smile at the screen. ‘Love you.’

‘Love you, too.’

Arya clicked on the red phone symbol and looked at her sketchbook. Wow. She really hadn’t meant to draw that.

***

It was a conundrum. A puzzle to be worked out with diagrams and hypotheses and graphs. It was the first time that Arya wouldn’t be in her school uniform to meet Podrick, and she was going to a gig, if maybe a weird, nerdy one, and she had no idea what to wear. 

After throwing all her clothes on the bed, she realised that she was running out of time – there was no way Podrick would be late, because that was not something he was physically capable of doing – and dragged on her raggedy denim miniskirt, black and white tights and a Run DMC t-shirt that used to be Robb’s.

There was a crash at her bedroom door as she slid eyeliner under her bottom lids. 

‘Cousin Arya, your _boyfriend_ is here.’ Robin ran into her room and flung himself at the window as if he was Spiderman.

‘Shut up, dick-face,’ she said, getting up to see that Podrick had just parked his moped at the end of their driveway.

‘You can’t call me a dick-face unless I have a dick actually on my face, and you only managed to draw that on me once, so that is an Incorrect Insult,’ said Robin, following her down the stairs.

‘Shame,’ said Arya.

‘Are you going to kiss him?’ he said. ‘Are you going to stroke him? Are you going to put your tongue in his eye?’

‘No,’ said Arya.

Aunt Lysa was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, grabbing onto Arya’s arms with her pinching, insane fingers. ‘Who is he?’

Arya had told her twenty times. ‘He is Podrick. He’s been helping me revise. He is taking me to a gig. For revision.’ Sort of.

The bell rang. Oh god. He had actually come to the door.

Robin opened it and shouted ‘welcome to our humble abode!’ very merrily.

‘Hello,’ said Podrick to him as Robin pushed past him into the driveway, whooping, before he turned to Arya and Lysa. He was wearing a thin leather sort of coat-jacket and holding a helmet in each hand, and his hair was sticking up. ‘You look very nice,’ he said to Arya, in a completely unforced, cheerful way.

So do you, thought Arya.

Lysa was still clutching onto her niece’s arms. ‘Where are you taking her?’

‘To the Grain Barge on the river,’ said Podrick. ‘It’s, um, a night called Synth Attack.’ He looked at Arya with a slightly disconcerted expression. ‘If that’s ok.’

‘I don’t like the sound of this,’ Lysa said, blinking, a lot, and released Arya only to jab her finger in her face. ‘Take your rape alarm. And your mace. You can’t trust anyone these days.’ She lowered her voice to a hissing stage whisper as she eyed him sidelong. ‘Especially not people who like _electronic music_.’ The last two words uttered with the same vehemence as she might have said ‘torturing hedgehogs’ or ‘making babies cry.’

‘Podrick is very trustworthy, Aunt Lysa,’ Arya said, taking advantage of her releasing to inch past Podrick and grab him by the arm to pull him out of the house.

Robin was dancing around in front of Podrick’s moped. ‘I like your motorbike,’ he said, or rather sang.

‘It’s a moped, you nutter,’ said Arya, taking Podrick’s offered helmet.

‘Thank you,’ said Podrick to Robin. ‘I’ll take you on it another time, if you like.’

‘There is really no need,’ said Arya, getting on behind him.

The moped started first time, thank god, so that they could start moving before Lysa raced out and started hurling karmic quotes at them.

As they turned the corner, you could just hear Robin shouting ‘I love you, Podrick!’ at the top of his voice.

***

The Grain Barge was, as the name suggested, a boat on the river, which rocked its punters with loving slowness, though had the slight disadvantage of making some rather queasy. There was a bar at one end and a tiny stage at the other, upon which two very serious men in blazers were currently crouched over two huge contraptions turning things. Very loud, weird spacey sounds were coming out of them, like some trippy 1970s movie, and the whole place was almost entirely full of nodding bearded men. And Arya.

Podrick had explained to her that they were using a classic 1970 MiniMoog synthesizer and the Prodigy Analogue synthesiser, the latter being apparently hardly ever used these days because it was so massive and unwieldy, but Arya was only half-listening, because she was mostly just looking at him. 

She couldn’t stop looking at him. He had come back from dumping their helmets and coats in the corner wearing a plain white t-shirt, and had put a dark beanie hat on his head. She kept glancing at the curve of his upper arm, which she could see quite a lot of because the sleeves were rolled up a bit, and the tiny patch of skin where the neckline of his t-shirt dipped. He had on some beaded necklace thing, too. Jesus.

In the break, they went and sat on the old harbour rope-bollards outside, watching the other boats go past. Arya had cajoled him into buying her a beer, forgetting that he was driving, and had given up trying to share it with him. He was a Health and Safety sort of boy. But one who could also floor henchmen. And have god-like sex with Missy.

‘These are really good.’ He had persuaded her to show him her sketchbook, and was currently looking at a picture of a longhaired girl with nose-piercings and a big wolf’s head as a sort of headdress. And she was holding three severed and bleeding heads in her hand. One of them looked a bit like Joffrey, not that Podrick would know that.

‘Thanks.’ Her brain was still rocking slightly from the motion of the boat, or maybe from the forty-five minutes of woozy noodling that she has just stood through.

‘Is that what you want to do?’ he said. 

‘Maybe.’ Definitely. ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Engineering, hopefully. At Imperial College. Or Edinburgh, maybe.’

‘Awesome.’ He was flicking back through her book and she suddenly had a little lighter-strike of panic and leant over to grab it. ‘Don’t look at that. It’s old stuff. It’s rubbish.’ 

Too late. He gazed down at the page she had drawn when she was talking to Sansa. Gazed down at it for some time. ‘Is that – me?’

‘No.’ She tried to make her voice sound very simple, blank. Like he would.

He looked up at her.

Arya stared at the river very fiercely. ‘It’s just a guy in a kilt. A random guy.’ Doing a judo move. Holding a plate of macaroons.

There was a cheer from a party boat on the river. 

Podrick watched it go by. And its wake. He furrowed his brow. ‘So, um, when are your retakes again?’

‘Six days. Wednesday.’

He shrugged. ‘I can give you one more lesson if you like. I mean, we’ve done our official number of sessions, but if you want a last bit of help. I’m free on Saturday.’ It was unspoken that it would be back at his.

‘Thanks. That would be really cool.’ 

Arya was finally beginning to realise that there was something else that he might be able to help her with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PICSET. Linkable [here](http://i.imgur.com/lwvE7Fn.jpg).  
> 
> 
>  **HELPFUL BRITISH NOTES** :
> 
> Year 12 = aged 16/17, Missandei's year
> 
> GCSEs = A reminder that GCSEs are exams British students take aged 16.
> 
> Crufts = UK dog show/competition of great splendour. Mr Swimmingfox and I watch it on tv, laughing hysterically, every year.
> 
> LSE = London School of Economics, i.e. Sansa is a brainbox (although not so much in her choice of lover)
> 
> Imperial College = another excellent academic institution in London
> 
>  **BRITISH SLANG LESSON FROM PROFESSOR SWIMMING FOX** :
> 
> Swot = clever student, someone who likes to work hard, brainbox. Mildly derogatory.
> 
> Safe = can mean a cool person ‘yeah, she’s safe, bruv’, or to signify agreement, or in Missy’s case here, to signifiy that something is good.
> 
> Oh my days = kids often say this instead of ‘oh my god/gosh’ etc, to express surprise, happiness, shock etc


	6. Combustion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pants = underwear. Just sayin' because there are quite a lot of mentions in this chapter.
> 
> Would love to know what you think of this one!

Hydrocarbons. Fractionation. Compounds.

Newtons. Gravitational field strength.

They were going over all of it, one more time, and Arya was mostly thinking about Podrick’s hands, which had suddenly become fascinating to her. And the mole on his upper right arm. And how on earth she was going to ask him what she had thought about asking him for the last 38 hours.

She leant over her work on his desk. ‘Done.’

He had a look, his foot crossed up on his knee, which made his legs look massive. ‘Done.’ Took a breath. Raised his eyebrows.

‘So I just have to pass all my exams now.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Just imagine macaroons baking in the canteen.’ Smiled.

Arya snorted. ‘Fat chance.’ Some guy fresh from catering college was in charge of school dinners and could only seem to make various sorts of pies, as well as looking quite a lot like one. 

She stood up. There was a definitely an awkward feeling in the room. So that was it, then? He didn’t seem to be about to ask if she wanted a cuppa, or invite her to another nerd-gig. ‘I guess I should go,’ she said.

‘I can take you,’ he said, looking quite cheerful as he closed his laptop. 

‘Um,’ she said. It was now or never. He would take her on his death-trap moped and she would not have an excuse to be in his house again. ‘Podrick.’ He glanced up. ‘Will you have sex with me?’

Podrick’s face, blank at the best of times if not pulled wide in that ridiculous beam of his, went blank, and became more blank again, like a builder had smoothed it over with polyfilla. Except for his eyes, which raced through surprised to baffled to panicked to baffled to surprised again, about ten times faster than the maximum speed on his moped. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Do you mean – now?’

There was no going back now. ‘Yes.’ Arya tried very hard to think what Missy would say in this situation. ‘I’m feeling, you know, horny,’ she said, in not entirely convincing fashion. 

‘It’s a bit –’ He looked at his laundry basket. ‘I’m not sure that Mr. Lannister –’ he seemed to be forgetting how to string words together. ‘The, you know, the mentor-student relationship. Um.’ 

‘Mr. Lannister doesn’t need to know. Anyway, our lessons have finished now.’

Podrick folded his hands together, and unfolded them. ‘Don’t you – I mean, you don’t have a – boyfriend?’

‘No.’ Why would he think that? She had gone on a weird modular synth date with him. Maybe it really definitely hadn’t been a date. Crap. ‘I’m not – I’m not going out with Jojen, if that’s what you mean.’ 

‘Oh.’ He didn’t exactly look relieved at the news. 

‘So –?’ She tried to raise her eyebrows at him. He looked like a train was coming towards him at full speed. ‘You’re really good at teaching stuff.’ She bit her lip, and the grin still wriggled its way out.

His smile was utterly sheepish. ‘What do you want - teaching?’ he said.

Arya shifted her weight to her other leg. Wanted to die. ‘I mean, I haven’t, you know. Done it. Properly.’ Fooling around with Mycah didn’t count. Nor did #SuckSelfieGate with Joffrey. 

A little cloud hanging over his eyebrows cleared. But only a little one. 

‘Do you have any condoms?’ she said.

He nodded, looked pained. 

‘Cool, we’re good to go, then.’ Spoken with more confidence than she felt. I am like Missy, she thought. I am fabulous. 

She stood, and waited. He wasn’t looking at her, or saying a word. She could hear the gnatty little buzz of his laptop. A bike, braking outside. Traffic on the motorway three and a half miles away. Well, this was getting mortifying. Fine. She opened her mouth to say – 

Podrick stood up. ‘Do you really want to?’

‘Yes,’ she said, slightly too loudly. 

He stared down towards the carpet, as if trying to solve an extremely hard sub-atomic conundrum. Walked over to her. The air in the room changed subtly, molecules moving faster in the air. 

He blinked. 'Is it ok to lock the door?'

'Probably best.' Uncle Ilyn's music was blasting away downstairs.

He went to the door, slid the little bolt over, and came back to her. Standing so close, he was suddenly very tall. Like a sturdy tree. Arya looked at his chest and inched her eyes up. 

‘Shall I – can I kiss you?’ he said.

She grinned again. Treading her own fine line between hysteria and nerves. Hysteria 50%, nerves, 50%. Nodded. Let her bag slide off her shoulder, hoping it was moving in a slow, sexy fashion, until got caught on her sleeve and she had to shake it off, quite violently.

Podrick leant down and kissed her and Arya tried not to giggle. Missy would not have giggled. No, she would concentrate and it wouldn’t be weird, just nice, and actually it was quite nice, and Arya started thinking _the latent heat of steam is determined using a calorimeter and steam generator. The latent heat of melting is the same as the latent heat of fusion_. ‘What?’ she said, not meaning to out loud, except it was into his mouth and came out as a sort of sticky blob of nonsense.

He looked at her. ‘Are you – is this ok?’

‘Yes.’ She grinned at him. ‘ _Yes_.’

He smiled back, quite tentatively. His face had pinked, and here it was again, closer and yep, he was kissing her again, and this time he was running a finger very lightly down each arm and catching her hands at the bottom. Ok, that was definitely nice. Mycah had just sort of pawed at her, like he was wearing big padded ski gloves. 

I am going to see Podrick Payne naked, shouted Arya in her head, hysteria rocketing to 85%, And then she thought, shit, maybe he wanted _her_ to be naked.

She fumbled at his jeans as he kissed her a bit more, all with the same really quite nice slowness and total lack of slobbery washing-machine grossness. She found his belt buckle and knelt down. Hysteria, 25%, nerves 75%, sex goddess vibes, 25%. No, that didn't work.

‘Um. Arya?’

She looked up at him as she pulled his zip down. Whoops, yes, there it was, a long lump of Pod-dick under his pants, which were grey and white and thankfully quite normal-looking. ‘Yeah?’

‘What are you doing?’

She still had one hand on his zip. ‘Giving you a blowjob?’

He was standing with his arms by his sides. ‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘Don’t you want me to?’ She looked again at his crotch, which was making quite a bold statement to the contrary.

‘I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, but I mean –’ he put his hands at her shoulders, and she began to rise so that he could lodge them under her arms and bring her back up. ‘You don’t have to right now.’

‘Oh. Ok.’ She thought everyone did that. That all girls always sucked the guy off first, to get him going, and looked all big-eyed and creepy at him, or at the camera.

Podrick put his fingers at the bottom of her t-shirt and gently pulled it out from her waistband. 

‘Um,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to take everything off.’

His eyebrows tilted up like Tower Bridge being opened.

‘I mean, you could just take the bottom half off.’

He looked at her. ‘I think – it will feel nicer for you if, you know.’ He eyed the hem of her t-shirt, which he still had in his hands. ‘But whatever you want.’

She stared at him. Fuck it. She pulled the material, quickly, dragging it over her head before she had time to stop herself. Black bra, slight padding that made almost no difference to her complete lack of rack.

He put his hands at the waistband of her skirt. She turned to the side and he moved his hands to the zip and pulled it down and the skirt down with it, and the whole time his eyes were on her, as if she was going to combust and he’d have to catch all the bits. Hydrogen plus oxygen equals carbon dioxide and water, she thought, as Podrick turned her round very carefully so that he could pull her tights down.

She could hear him laugh once as he knelt down, a quiet, awkward breath in his throat. ‘I like your pants.’

Arya craned round. They said BITE ME on her arse in neon yellow on black. ‘Thanks.’ Please don’t bite me, she thought. I am not ready to be bitten. She sat down on the edge of the bed and helped him roll them off, and now she was only in her bra and pants. In her _bra and pants_. ‘Aren’t you going to take anything off?’ she said.

He looked quite nervous himself then. Hysteria 20%, nerves 20%, sex goddess 60%. Arya separated her legs so that he could kneel up between them, and she pulled at his t-shirt a bit. He took it off, making his hair stick up like someone in a cheap hair gel advert.

She looked at him, and kept darting her eyes away before looking at him again. Podrick Payne was really not fat. Why had she ever thought he was fat? His madly wide face had confused the issue. He was quite broad, and the bit below his shoulders was sort of round, but in a nice way. And the rest of him, was – well the rest of him was making her blush. How had he ended up being the one making her blush rather than the other way round?

‘You need to get a better suit for school,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because -’ she waved her fingers down in front of his torso. ‘Because it’s not really selling you.’

He smiled widely and like he didn’t really care about his crap suit. Swallowed, and took his jeans off. And his socks. Sat down next to her on the bed. Put his hand on her back and trailed it down her spine.

Arya had goosebumps. Part cold, part nerves at the fact that he was sitting right next to her in his pants with a serious erection. Arya-neurons on red alert. She had four hundred more goosebumps when he leant over and kissed her neck, and five hundred more when he started fiddling with her bra clasp. Shit, and then her bra was undone, and she was helping him take it off, even though she didn’t want anyone to look at her chest, ever.

Please don’t think they are small and tiny and crap, she thought, lying back – which was probably worse, as what little was even there was now reduced to flat, dead jellyfish, the sort that Rickon liked smashing with spades on the beach when he was five. 

But Podrick wasn’t staring in horror or repulsion. He was leaning over her and kissing her stomach, quite a lot, his hands stroking her as if she was a very plush, lazy cat, and then he was kissing her hip bone, and her inner thigh, and moving his face between her legs.

‘Um,’ she said.

‘Are you ok?’ He had a hand under her thigh.

‘Um.’ She stared at the spiky, bobbly paint effect of the ceiling. ‘Yes?’

‘Ok. Just say.’ 

He ran his fingers very slowly under the edge of her pants and Arya burst out laughing. Her stupid, leprechaun laugh. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Ticklish.’ Laughed again. The laugh turned into a wriggle as he removed her pants, and a sigh, and after that Arya shut up for quite a while. 

The latent heat of boiling is also known as the latent heat of vaporisation, she thought. Solids melt into liquids, liquids boil into gases, Podrick is licking me, gases condense into liquids, now he’s using his finger, or maybe his thumb, liquids solidify into solids. Well, that wasn’t true. Liquids just got more _liquidy_. She was living proof, right here. Someone should record this experiment.

‘Argh,’ said Arya, as Podrick did something different with his tongue and his fingers. She was naked and she was lying on a boy’s bed and he was totally, absolutely going down on her in about ten different ways. She felt like an extremely messy sex goddess. 

‘Podrick,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he sort of said in a muffled way from down there.

‘I can’t remember the word for when a solid goes straight into a gas.’

All his movements stopped and he raised his head. ‘Sublimation.’

‘Sublimation,’ she said to the ceiling, and then ‘argh,’ again for several disparate or maybe extremely linked reasons, before leaning up on her elbows. ‘Aren’t you going to, you know, come up here?’

He leant on his elbows, too, between her legs. His cheeks were extremely pink and there was a sheen to his mouth. ‘I wanted you to – I mean, I was hoping I would make you – do you want me to?’

Did she? It was all very nice, what he was doing, in a hilarious, mushy sort of way, and there was quite a low-flamed Bunsen burner thing going on in her crotch, but she wanted to get it over with. ‘Yes.’

He came up beside her onto the bed, wiping his mouth, and he’d taken his pants off at some point and was utterly, completely naked. Both of them were. Naked naked naked. Skin and bone and muscle and literally nothing else. And Arya started thinking of porn again, and how there could be a camera right there in the corner filming them, except that she had never seen a porn clip that had a room with a one-litre bottle of Irn-Bru, a Russian constructivist poster and a modular synth handbook in the background.

‘Hang on.’ Podrick suddenly leaned away, towards his laptop, and she thought, oh right, maybe he wants some on in the background, don’t boys like that? Except instead he just tapped three keys and dark, wonky instrumental music started coming out of his speakers. He stretched for a blue stripey towel that was hanging over a chair. Looked at her awkwardly.

Of course. Because she was going to _bleed_. He was going to put his dick inside her and she would probably burst like a balloon and make crazy modern art stylings everywhere. Arya rolled over onto her side to let him lay it out, and rolled back.

He lay next to her and put his hand underneath her neck. Kissed her some more and didn’t really taste of anything too much, which meant that she hadn’t tasted of anything much either down there, thank _god_ , because she had spent twenty minutes looking at vagina fresheners in Boots yesterday before running away when the assistant had asked if she’d needed any help.

Now Podrick was half on top of her. She was trying to think only sexy thoughts, except her brain had somehow become Stephen Hawking’s or Albert Einstein’s or Marie Curie’s, and also there were electric guitars doing the same looping, jangly thing over and over again. He was straddling one of her thighs, sitting up a bit more and carefully tearing open a condom wrapper which he’d got from a drawer, and Arya was looking at his erection and hysteria and nerves had combined into one ginormous, simultaneously combusting and vaporising Death Star. 

‘Arya?’

‘Yes?’ It came out weirdly loud again.

‘Are you on the Pill?’

‘Um, no. Why, do you not want to use that?’ Of course he didn’t. Boys didn’t like condoms. Condoms were for boys who were under the thumb. Bitch-slapped.

‘No, I do. I just thought – it would be more careful that way. If we had both.’

‘Isn’t -’ she looked at the little sickly-beige condom in his hand. ‘That safe enough?’

‘98.2 percent,’ he said immediately, and looked sheepish.

‘Let’s throw caution to the wind,’ she said, and took a deep breath as he examined the condom extremely carefully, rolled it on, and looked up at her again. His eyebrows were really very cute. She nodded, and shivered a whole new tidal wave of goosebumps.

The mass of Podrick added to the mass of Arya. Or multiplied.

‘Ow. Wow. Ow.’ Well, ok, this was a very weird mixture of strange, slick niceness and extreme torture. 

He was right on top of her, and he was pushing into her with his dick, and looking at her. 

‘Wow.’

‘Are you ok?’ he said, looking a little flustered.

‘Mmm.’ It was a definite, assertive _mmm_. The music had gone robotic and squelchy. She had gone robotic and squelchy. She tried to focus on the nice things – his hand under her at the base of her spine, and him kissing the dip at the base of her throat, and how slow and careful he was being. Energy equals mass times specific latent heat.

‘Joules,’ she said.

He stopped, inside her, and looked confused. ‘Are you – I’m Podrick.’

She gazed at him. ‘Joules. Energy is measured in joules.’

‘Joules,’ he said, nodded, and touched her hair, which made her shiver again. ‘Are you alright?’ His voice had gone even softer than normal.

‘Yeah. Um. It sort of – really hurts.’

‘I’ll stop.’ He was already moving his hips away.

‘You don’t have to.’

‘No, I’ll stop.’ There was a wet noise as they came apart. He didn’t look pissed off or embarrassed. Just rolled the condom off again, and wiped his hands carefully on the towel and lay down again next to her. He put a pillow underneath her head and found one for himself.

He hadn’t even come. The transfer of pollen from anther to stigma, whispered another voice in her head. 

‘I messed it all up,’ Arya said. She wondered if she had bled much. A tiny dribble or a big, murder-scene puddle.

He smiled. ‘No, you didn’t. You were very nice.’

She rested her head to the side, facing him. ‘Do you want me to suck you off now?’

‘No.’ His eyebrows raised with his smile and just stayed there even as his face smoothed out a bit. They were the shape of skis.

‘It was way nicer you doing it. What you did before. Rather than me, I mean.’ She had definitely given herself pretty nice orgasms before. But she didn’t have a three foot-long tongue. Tongue was definitely a revelation.

The beam he gave her was the best one yet. 

‘Isn’t it gross?’ she said, still slightly imagining someone with a three foot-long tongue and telling herself to remember to draw it later.

He shook his head. ‘I like doing it.’

‘Why?’

He made a small, faintly self-conscious sound in his throat. ‘I don’t know. Just – it’s nice to know that I’m – giving you pleasure.’

There was a loud sound downstairs. Metal, clattering. His face changed. 

‘Is he ok?’ Arya said.

‘I’ll go and have a look.’ He got up, put his jeans on over his a-bit-smaller-now penis and pulled his t-shirt on as he left the bedroom.

He came back upstairs looking a bit more flustered. ‘Uncle Ilyn’s been trying to cook himself a hot lunch. Got a bit annoyed. I have to – sorry.’ 

‘No, it’s totally cool.’ 

And he disappeared again.

She got up, all residual sexiness evaporating as she wiped herself – a bit of blood, quite a lot of sex-gunk – and found all of her clothes. She was smelly and sweaty and the electronic synthy weirdness was only getting weirder. No RnB or bashment or One Direction for Podrick.

Illyn had definitely made more mess than her. Podrick was on his knees in the kitchen, mopping up what looked like baked beans and spaghetti. His uncle and her aunt should get together, Arya thought. Ilyn was sitting at the little dining table, looking at his useless hand. 

‘Um. I’ll be off, then,’ she said.

Podrick looked up. ‘Will you be ok getting back?’

‘Yeah, of course.’ I am an adult now, a fully sexualised adult, she thought. ‘Thanks for the, um, lesson.’ 

‘That’s ok.’ He didn’t smile, but there was definitely a light in his eyes.

Arya waited for the bus at the end of the road, looking quite meaningfully at the old lady with her shopping trolley, wondering how obvious it was that she had just had sex. 

She had done it. A fully paid-up member of adulthood. De-virginised. Never in a million light years would she have imagined, even a week ago, that it would have been achieved by having sex with Podrick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PICSET. Linkable [here](http://i.imgur.com/oLlztnP.jpg).
> 
> **HELPFUL BRITISH NOTES**  
>  polyfilla = generic brand-name term for wall-filler paste
> 
> [Tower Bridge. Being opened](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Cmglee_Tower_Bridge_tall_ship.jpg).
> 
> Irn-Bru = do you guys have this in North America? It's a luridly orange fizzy drink beloved by the Scots.
> 
> Boots = the UK's most common chemist's shop/pharmacy store.


	7. Reaction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realise that I'm firing these out thick and fast. Want to get them out before I go away. Last one on Monday!

‘Why are you looking at your phone?’ I’m right here.’ 

Jojen and Arya were sitting on the furthest bench from the school buildings, even though it was raining a bit. Bronn the groundsman had apparently been on the warpath about the stubs and contraceptives and general teenager detritus in their customary corner so they were giving it a wide berth for now.

‘I know,’ she said.

Jojen’s eyes went very narrow. ‘Who are you talking to?’

‘No one.’ She put her phone in her bag. ‘Clearly.’

It had been two days since she had had sex with Podrick. Two days. She should have messaged him. But he hadn’t messaged her. And when she passed him in the corridor just before lunch, he had given her a really strange look. The opposite of a normal Podrick-look, which was perfectly uncomplicated and kind.

Maybe she had been really rubbish. He’d just been nice to her until he’d got her out of the house. She was a disaster-fuck. That’s what happened: she gave blowjobs to boys she hated and smashed their hands in, and had sex with boys she liked and stopped talking to them.

She let out a big sigh.

‘Out with it,’ said Jojen.

‘I can’t. You’ll laugh.’

‘I promise I won’t laugh.’

‘You will.’

‘I won’t.’

‘I had sex with Podrick.’

There was the slightest pause, but not much. Jojen wasn’t a boy to be ruffled by a single thing. Even if the universe was falling down around his ears, he would shrug and pop another fag in his mouth. ‘Well done you,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Of course.’ He waved a hand vaguely in front of his face. ‘Please observe my lack of merriment and mirth.’

She sighed again.

‘So he didn’t live up to Missandei’s glowing report?’

‘No, it was nice.’ Even though she was entirely rubbish. Arya crossed her legs. ‘He hasn’t talked to me since, that’s all.’

Jojen gazed at her. ‘Have you talked to him?’

‘No.’

He laughed a small, quiet laugh behind closed lips and shook his head. ‘Not rocket science there.’

‘Something’s gone wrong, but I don’t know what.’

Jojen stretched, long limbs spiralling up into the drizzle. ‘Only one way to find out.’

‘What?’

He was already standing and pulling her up.

***

‘Please don’t make me go in there,’ said Arya. They were standing outside the Sixth Form Common Room door. There were the sounds of a TV and people laughing hysterically and Arya suddenly felt very young.

‘Not allowed in here, rugrats,’ said some very large, dickish rugby player, passing them in the corridor. 

Jojen winked at him, three parts laconic to two parts seductive, before turning back to Arya. ‘Knock, then.’

‘No.’

He knocked, loudly, three times.

‘Bastard,’ said Arya, under her breath.

‘Why the fuck is anyone knocking?’ said a girl, loudly, as she opened the door, and looked at the two students in uniform. ‘Oh. Hello.’

‘Is Podrick there?’ said Jojen. ‘Podrick Payne.’

The girl’s face sort of melted into a puddingy goo for a moment, before she seemed to pull herself together. ‘Hang on.’

The door shut.

‘I hate you,’ said Arya, kicking the door jamb.

‘You love me,’ said Jojen, just as the door opened and Podrick appeared.

His face cleared into surprise and a sort of pleasure and then something more guarded. ‘Hello,’ he said, in almost a question, which was something that he never did.

Jojen was drifting away along the corridor.

‘Um,’ said Arya. ‘Hi.’ 

‘Are you ok?’ A perfectly unreadable face. He was pretending that they hadn’t had sex. 

She would go home and tattoo _Terrible Shag_ onto her cheeks. ‘Yeah, I just -’ she bit her lip and looked at him. 

Podrick shut the door behind him and she followed him a little way along the corridor. ‘Are you stuck on something?’

‘No.’ Yes, she shouted in her head. ‘Um. My exams are tomorrow.’

‘I know.’

‘Aren’t you going to wish me luck?’

‘You don’t need any luck,’ he said, straight back, his face softening just a bit, before becoming careful again.

‘I thought – maybe – are you going to the dance?’ She sounded utterly juvenile. 

‘Um. I’m not sure.’

‘I thought that maybe you might want to invite me to go with you.’ Every word was like walking a tightrope, ten thousand feet up. She wanted to be sick. She wanted to die.

He swallowed, and looked very puzzled. ‘Look, Arya,’ he glanced around and lowered his voice. ‘I get why you asked me to, you know, at the weekend, but you don’t have to pretend that it’s anything more.’

Arya looked at him blankly.

‘I mean, I know I wasn’t your ideal choice.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Fencing-moped-macaroons-judo rescue-modular-synths. 

‘Because I – heard about something you said. About me.’

Elephants trampled through Arya’s brain. She couldn’t think of a single thing that she had said. It was only Jojen who even knew about – she looked at him. ‘Freya Frey?’

Podrick tried not to show any recognition but she knew the subtleties of his expressions now. 

‘Freya fucking Frey? She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’

‘So you didn’t say you’d only – sleep with me if no one else was alive?’

‘Conscious. I said if no one else was _conscious_.’ 

His eyes became two big mud pools of sorrow. 

‘No, I – fuck, I was talking out of my arse. I didn’t mean it. It was ages ago. I – changed my mind.’

Podrick stood very still, and took a slow, heavy breath that seemed to dump all the air out of him. ‘I’ll – our lessons have finished, so. Um. I’ll see you round.’ He turned and went back into the Common Room.

Arya spent the next five minutes kicking the skirting board, eventually so hard that she felt something crack. ‘Ow,’ she said, and fell to the floor. 

***

‘Well, this is just fucking typical, isn’t it?’ Sandor Clegane, counsellor of no one’s dreams, was striding along the corridor towards her. 

Arya’s toes were throbbing. It felt like a concrete block the size of a house was currently being pressed very slowly onto them. 

He looked down at her naked foot, which had gone red and swollen, folding his arms. Two of her toenails were bloody. ‘What the hell have you done?’

‘I think I have broken my toe,’ she said, with quite a croaky, hopeless voice. And burst into tears.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said. 

The secretary looked up at him from her desk. ‘You’re the only one free to take her, Mr. Clegane.’

He waved a hand at her. ‘Ay, alright, keep your hair on. For fuck’s sake. I’m like a fucking nanny. Come on. Up with you.’

Arya was still blubbing. ‘I can’t walk.’

‘Christ on a bike.’ He put his arm out. ‘We had better not be waiting in A&E for fucking hours.’

***

Three hours later, they were still sitting in the raucous Accident and Emergency Ward, waiting for the x-rays to come back. Arya had her leg up on a chair and an ice-gel pack on her foot. A homeless man was wailing loudly and rocking back and forth two seats away from her.

Sandor was eating his fourth packet of Hula Hoops. ‘You owe me,’ he said, spitting crisp-dust into the air.

‘Ok,’ she said. The painkillers were making her feel sleepy. ‘Sorry.’

‘If I’d have known you’d done that to yourself on purpose, I wouldn’t have bloody brought you.’

Arya slumped back on her seat.

Sandor sighed, a sound like a gale-force wind. ‘Why did you kick your own toes in?’ he said both heavily and sing-songy, as if he was a martyr for even asking.

‘Because I was annoyed.’

‘Aye, well, it’s a step up from breaking someone’s else’s hand with a cricket bat, I suppose.’ Another sigh when she didn’t say anything else. ‘Annoyed at what?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Of course I don’t want to fucking know. But it’s five o’clock, and I should be in the pub and not watching day-drunks puke, so enlighten me.’

Arya stared at the clock, which was ticking extremely slowly. Slower than normal. ‘You know I was being mentored?’

‘Aye.’

‘Well, the guy who was teaching me heard that I’d said something mean about him.’

‘Oh, the drama. Spare me.’

‘Really mean.’

Sandor held his hands out, looking bored and exasperated. 

Fine. She would have to tell him. ‘I slept with him. And this stupid girl told him I’d said I’d only sleep with him if everyone else was unconscious.’

His laugh was like an attack dog being surprised. ‘Charming.’

‘I know.’

‘Why the fuck did you sleep with him if you thought that?’

‘I don’t think that. I really like him.’ Saying it out loud made her realise how much it was true. She looked at him. ‘So what I do?’

‘For the love of god, am I supposed to give you bloody romantic advice now? God fucking help me.’ Sandor crunched down the crisp packet in a fist and chucked it at the bin. It hit the side and fell to into a puddle of sick on the floor. ‘Look, isn’t it bloody obvious? Say you’re fucking sorry. Though I can’t say that if I’d heard that I’d forgive them in fucking hurry.’

He got up and went to the desk, and came back glowering even more. ‘Just another hour, she says. Busy today, she says.’ He jabbed a finger at her, or rather at her swollen foot. ‘You owe me.’

***

Arya had two severely fractured toes. The doctor had been quite impressed that she’d managed to do that to herself by kicking at a wall. And gave her some leaflets for counselling, which Sandor had snorted at.

Now she was lying on her bed for a third evening, feeling like shit and with her leg up on pillows, as mournful, slightly out-of-tune brass notes emanated from Robin’s room next door. Aunt Lysa had almost had a heart attack when Sandor had brought her home and tried to spray him with air freshener, but she had actually been quite nice to Arya since. Kept bringing her chamomile teas (vomit-inducing) and trying to burn rosemary oil in her room (drowsy-making) and reading her bits from her latest library book, ‘From Within: Women Who Love Too Much and Self-Love Too Little’ (giggle-inspiring).

Her toes hurt like fuck, but she mostly felt like shit because of Podrick. She had retaken her mocks yesterday with three other no-hopers in the cavernous hall while Ms. Sand bashed her eyelashes outrageously at Mr. Baratheon. Every bloody question had made her think of him. Waves and cos and hydrocarbons. She hadn’t heard anything from him and had seen some pink-haired Year 13 girl laughing her head off next to him in the canteen.

It was the worst thing, his look – it would have been better if he’d shouted or screamed or punched something, but Podrick would never do any of those things. 

‘I am a dick,’ she said to herself as there was a knock on the door and Robin put his head round.

‘Please can I play you my euphonium composition?’ he said.

Arya could think of fifty thousand things that she would rather be doing. She sighed. ‘Ok.’ 

Robin made a small whooping sound and disappeared, bringing back a music stand and three sheets of manuscript paper with weird scrawls all over them. And his euphonium, which was almost as tall as him. 

‘It is my first twelve-tone composition,’ he said. ‘I am trying to emulate Schoenberg in his post-Romantic, serialist phase. Though I have also been influenced by the extended techniques of Berio’s fourteen sequenzas. It is called ‘I Like Milk.’ 

Arya tried not to smile as he started parping away, his eyebrows going in several directions at once. Podrick had eyebrows like that. Podrick would probably know who Schoenberg was, even if she didn’t.

She looked at her phone. After their third proper lesson, she’d snapped a quick pic of him to go with his number, and he’d been not quite ready. The way he was sitting in it had made the shoulders of his suit jacket go up, and he had a wide, surprised look on his face. It wasn’t really very flattering. But it was all she had. 

‘I’ve finished,’ said Robin. 

Arya clapped him and he gave a florid bow and sat down next to her with his euphonium and music on his lap. ‘It’s not complete,’ he said from behind it. ‘I’m thinking that the second movement might have more retrogrades in it. But I’m not sure yet.’ 

‘You don’t care what people think of you either, do you?’ she said.

He played one very long, very solemn note, like a foghorn on a sinking ship. ‘I just do what I’m good at,’ he said, playing another, and writing them both down.

Sandor had said she just needed to say sorry. Hi Podrick, sorry I insulted you and your dick and your entire being. Please smile at me again. Yeah, maybe she shouldn’t say actual words. 

And then she remembered the one thing that she was good at. Apart from the cricket bat thing.

***

By the time she got to Podrick’s house, her hip was killing her. Two buses and a walk that was mostly a crutch-aided hop had turned her into an eighty-year old woman. A really sweaty eighty-year old woman.

Please let him be in, she thought. Please let him not be in, she also thought. And knocked.

No answer. Great. She turned to leave, facing the crescent of the cul-de-sac with a complete lack of enthusiasm for another half-mile of hopping, and the door opened behind her.

Uncle Ilyn. His bald-headed eagle glare was on a special laser setting. His neck sagged like a cheap plastic bag. There was the sound of raggedy electric guitars blasting from the living room, which he seemed to be completely oblivious to.

‘Hello,’ said Arya. ‘Is Podrick in?’

He just glared some more and she wondered if her skin would start to peel off her bones, or maybe her lungs melt. Podrick didn’t appear on the stairs, or in the hallway.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, fumbling with her bag, feeling quite relieved. And disappointed. ‘Could you just give Podrick something for me?’ She was trying to hold her crutch under her elbow, but spun with it and watched her bag fall to the ground. ‘Fuck.’ She leaned down, standing on her good foot, and grabbed it, pulling out the brown envelope. Held it out to him.

His wide mouth was a firm line, apart from the tiny droop on his right side. He looked at her, and she could sense about ten thousand thoughts raging through him. But while his mouth didn’t change, his eyes began to. They softened at the edges, minutely, and he jerked his head, a sharp movement.

She looked past him into the hallway. ‘Oh, no, it’s ok. I don’t want to disturb you.’ From your long-term internal rage.

He frowned at her in a way that suggested that if she didn’t oblige, she’d probably be choking on her own crutch pretty soon. Jerked his head again.

‘Ok,’ she said, took a deep breath, and followed him into the house.

***

In the hallway, Uncle Ilyn had made a couple of initially mystifying gestures until Arya had realised it meant ‘tea.’ She had gone to the kitchen to make two. Put lots of sugar in both. To be honest, she was completely knackered and the thought of sitting down was a shiny, glittery one. She just wasn’t really sure what to say to the mute overlord in the other room.

She brought the mugs in one at a time. By the time she had limped into the living room with hers, Uncle Ilyn had spread out several records on the table, and was sitting back in his chair by the window, his weaker hand in his lap. Staring at her.

She stood over them. ‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Are these the ones you like listening to the most?’

There was the slightest sound in his throat, a small, tight half-groan. He gestured towards them.

Arya looked down at them again. They were all of the same band – two of the albums covers were stark black and white, four guys posing outside a caff, another one of a guy in a dodgy-looking seventies club. The one at the end was a live shot, one man with a mic and another looking open-mouthed at him. Arya leant over. Those fierce-as-fuck eyes. The jut of the chin.

She looked over at Uncle Ilyn. ‘Is this – you?’

He nodded.

‘Shit.’ She picked one up. Podrick had said he had been a singer. Although he was playing guitar in this one. ‘Can I play it?’

He nodded again.

Arya put the record on – with a bit of help from Uncle Ilyn – and sat on the other chair opposite him with her tea in her lap and her foot sticking out, throbbing. And together, they listened to the whole album of perky, angular, totally British-accented rock’n’roll.

Half an hour later, Arya stood up. ‘Can you give this to Podrick, please?’ She held out the brown envelope again.

Uncle Ilyn gestured to the table and she put it down. 

Arya picked up her crutch. ‘Thanks for the tea. I’ll let myself out.’ At the living room door, she turned back. ‘Your music’s amazing.’

This nod was softer, slower. She left him gazing out at the light nudging its way through the net curtains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PICSET! Linkable [here](http://i.imgur.com/i7fH5VE.jpg).
> 
> **BRITISH SLANG LESSON FROM PROFESSOR SWIMMINGFOX** :
> 
> shag = sex, also sexual partner
> 
> Hula Hoops = Fox's favourite brand of crisps, YUM
> 
>  **PODRICK'S ESOTERIC MUSIC CORNER** :
> 
> Well, not very esoteric really, but I based Illyn Payne partly on Wilko Johnson, the actor who plays him - he was part of seminal British pre-punk, pub-rock band Dr. Feelgood. More recently he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, went on a farewell tour, and [miraculously cured himself!](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/10/wilko-johnson-interview-ive-got-a-future) What a hero!


	8. Sublimation

Arya spent the day after she had hung out with Uncle Illyn looking at her phone. Swearing at it. Looking at it again. Putting it in a drawer and leaving the house. Hopping back up the stairs for it. All she got were messages from Jojen.

_come 2 dance_

_cant dance_

_come nyway_

_nooo_

_spoilsport_

Tonight was the Calais Jungle charity ball and Arya was going to stay at home and watch all of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 6 and stuff her face full of toffee popcorn and feel like shit. She’d give them some money next week for it.

Jojen sent a picture of himself looking sharp in a new gunmetal-coloured shirt. _u shall go the ball_

_fuck off fairygodmutha_

_I have a magic wand._  
_A v magic wand if u know what I mean_  
_MAGIC WAND_

Podrick Payne has sent you a message, said the top of her phone.

‘Fuck,’ said Arya, and sat up on her bed. 

_Got myself a new suit_.

What? She stared at her phone, and a photo popped up. ‘Holy fucking shit,’ she said. 

Podrick had sent her a photo. Of himself. A selfie, in his bathroom mirror, in a properly fitted suit with a lighter grey waistcoat, one hand in his pocket, and he was frowning a bit into his phone, and he looked super-killer-hot.

‘Um. Ok,’ said Arya, to the room. 

_For the dance_.

‘Ok,’ said Arya.

 _Wanna come_?

‘Shit,’ said Arya. ‘Fuck. Crap.’ She looked up at the door of her wardrobe. At her useless foot. ‘Shittingfuckcrap,’ she said.

 _Yes please_ , she typed and sent, with a lump the size of a train carriage in her throat.

 _Cool. See you in an hr_. 

***

Robin came into Arya’s room, drawn, as a bee would to the sticky anthers of a flower, by the sound of her wailing and shouting and throwing things.

‘What doth bring such a merry flight of temper, cousin Arya?’

Arya whipped round, ready to tear his ear off, rip his arm off, twist his tongue into bits. 

Robin was gazing at her, quite solemnly, like a weird little imp. Wearing some sort of Tudor neck-ruff. 

Arya sat down on the bed on top of most of her clothes. ‘I don’t have anything to wear,’ she said, in a pathetic whimper. ‘Podrick is coming to pick me up in twenty minutes and I do no have a _single fucking arsewiping fucking thing to wear_.’

Robin looked very serious. ‘I see,’ he said, and stroked his chin, narrowing his eyes at her bedroom floor, which had no visible carpet due to the clothes-carnage. ‘What is the occasion?’

Arya slumped onto her back. ‘Charity dance thing at school.’

‘Dress code?’

She shook her head. 

He nodded, quite calmly, and lifted one arm grandly into the air. ‘Never fear, dear lady. Your plight is nary a small, trifling thing to a great duke of Bristolia such as I.’ He folded his arms and for once looked a bit more normal. ‘Now show me all your tops.’

***

Twenty minutes later, Arya came limping downstairs to find Podrick in the doorway, trapped in a hug from Robin. Podrick looked up at her and his eyebrows did that skis-shape again. He was wearing his suit and he looked even more sick and awesome.

‘Where’s your moped?’ she said.

He blinked and his normal face returned. ‘I got the buses. It’s working, I’ve just got a cab coming.’ He looked at his watch. ‘In a sec.’

‘Arya is wearing my cape,’ Robin told him, his chin on Podrick’s stomach, gazing up at him adoringly.

‘Is she?’ He looked at her again. ‘It’s very nice.’

With Robin’s surprisingly excellent help, Arya was wearing a black boob tube and a little black skirt and pink tights and a big necklace. And Robin’s Kylo Ren cape, pinned to the back of her skirt to give it a long layer. It didn’t look completely idiotic.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Robin, and his voice cracked. 

Arya sighed. ‘Robin, if you didn’t want me to wear it, why did you bloody give it to me?’

‘I _do_ want you to,’ he said, wiping away one delicate tear as he finally disentangled himself from Podrick, who looked faintly relieved. ‘You just look very beautiful, That Is All.’ 

Podrick and Arya watched him flounce up the stairs and looked at each other. The clock in the hall ticked, wonkily. 

You look amazing, Arya shouted in her head. 

Podrick glanced at his watch. ‘I told them to be here at half past.’ He looked at her, and didn’t seem to know what to say. Took a step forward. A breath.

She wasn’t sure what to start with. She had to say something. ‘You -’

‘Another man in the house with my niece,’ said Lysa from the entrance to the kitchen, where she was leaning strangely. 

Podrick looked at Arya, slightly confused. 

‘The counsellor brought me home the other night after the toe thing.’ Arya waggled her foot.

‘I heard about that. Is it ok?’

She screwed her nose up a bit at him. ‘I’m learning to hop quite well.’

Podrick glanced past her shoulder. Lysa had disappeared, momentarily. ‘Thanks for –’ he leaned down a little, and his voice became even lighter than normal. ‘I liked what you left for me.’

In the brown envelope that Arya had given Uncle Ilyn, she’d put an illustration that had taken her two evenings and four attempts on heavyweight cartridge paper before she got it right. Wolfgirl and Kiltboy, and quite a lot of physics symbols that morphed into weapons, fighting the Tory government. On the back, she had written _I’m sorry. It’s not true. It’s the opposite of true_. And underneath that she had made up an elaborate equation to try and make that clearer.

‘No one’s drawn me anything before,’ he said, and his eyes were careful, but with a little dollop of warmth in them.

I’ll draw you anything, she thought. Took a deep breath. ‘I’m -’

‘Where are you taking her?’ Lysa suddenly appeared from the living room door, words and elbows like darts. 

‘To school, Mrs, um, Tully-Arryn,’ Podrick said. 

‘But it is the evening.’ Lysa narrowed her eyes, as if it was a test.

‘It’s a ball, Aunt Lysa,’ said Arya. ‘I’ve already told you. For charity.’

‘Balls are the _worst_ ,’ she said. ‘Dens of iniquity. Believe me, I know. You go there, dressed in all your finery -’ she gestured up and down at Arya, doing a quick double-take when she noticed Robin’s cape attached to her arse – ‘and before you know it, you’re round the back of the sheds with your skirts around your ankles, screaming into your lover’s neck whilst he whispers Byron in your ear and it’s only later that you find out that he’s doing exactly the same thing with two other women, and that his quotes are not even accurate.’ 

There was an awkward pause. 

‘Did you finish your book, Aunt Lysa?’

Lysa blinked. ‘Yes.’ She suddenly looked a bit disappointed in herself and rather calmer. ‘I need another one.’

There was the gentle scrunch of tyres outside. Thank fuck, thought Arya, pushing Podrick out of the door. ‘Off now,’ she said. ‘See you later.’ Don’t go haranguing David Beckham on Twitter again about his irresponsibly dangerous levels of attractiveness.

Lysa sighed, both defeatist and something a little more romantic, fluttery. ‘Have a nice time, dear,’ she said and waved from the door.

***

In the taxi, measuring the distance between their two hands that were resting just apart on the seat, Arya turned her head to him. ‘You haven’t asked me.’ Podrick looked at her. ‘How I did in my retakes.’

‘How did you do?’

‘Not like, flying colours. But three Bs and a C.’

The streetlights threw little orange bars of light into his eyes. He smiled. ‘I knew you’d get them.’

The taxi driver was playing some sort of Arabic music, loudly. Singing along a bit.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For helping me.’

‘That’s ok.’

‘Podrick.’ Arya took a deep breath. ‘I’m really sorry. I didn’t even mean it when I said it.’

His smile remained, though it was a shadow-version. ‘I shouldn’t have taken it to heart. It’s only because –’ he glanced down at his knees and back at her. ‘I like you a lot.’

A little knife stabbed Arya in the stomach. In a nice way. ‘I like you, too. Honest.’ She bit on her lip a little. ‘Please just erase Freya Frey from your brain.’ Or she would erase her from this earth. Maybe she would do that anyway – she would borrow Podrick’s fencing sword.

The distance between their fingers reduced, millimetre by millimetre, so that by the time the taxi and its singing driver turned the corner into the driveway of Casterly Academy, they were shyly interlinked, a little row of double helixes.

***

A lean shadow, wreathed in smoke, lurked against the wall of the school car park.

‘Hey Jojen,’ Arya called as they approached.

‘Hello, you two,’ said Jojen casually, as if Arya and Podrick holding hands was something he’d been used to seeing for years.

‘Where’s your little lioncub?’

Jojen blew out a sigh of smoke. ‘With a little lioness somewhere.’ He sounded rather melancholy.

‘Oh.’ Now didn’t seem the time to fist-pump at her victory. ‘Really? Sorry, bubba.’

He gave a shrug the shape of an equilateral triangle. ‘Plenty more where that came from.’ He didn’t seem to really mean it. There was a furrow of the brow, and a reassigning of his sharp half-smile. ‘Go on. Off with you.’

‘See you in a bit.’ Arya leant forward and kissed him on the cheek.

He gave her a little light, short salute, gestured only with the hand, as a First World War officer might before he went off on a suicidal mission, and drew another long, solitary breath on his cigarette.

***

In the main hall, the curtains had been drawn and industrious sixth-formers had strung up a varied array of fairy lights and glitterballs. People were bouncing around to Vampire Weekend and yelling at each other. Tommen Lannister was one of them, jumping up and down opposite a girl in a top with cat pawprints on it.

Sandor Clegane was scowling in the corner, looking like he’d sooner be in a pool full of sharks than on staff duty. Ms. Sand was drifting around in a long, floaty skirt with slits to her thighs, seemingly communicating a range of suggestive things to Mr. Martell, who was both watching her and talking to two attractive Year 13 boys. Mr. Baratheon was talking to Mr. Lannister by the strictly-non-alcoholic bar, probably about ways of humanely disposing of students who had not got enough A grades.

Pyp and Freya Fucking Frey looked at Arya and Podrick open-mouthed as they walked in. Podrick told her he’d get them drinks and went off to the bar.

‘Safe, blud,’ said Pyp as they walked over to her. He seemed quite impressed. ‘You got got, innit?’ 

‘I guess so,’ said Arya. 

‘Are you going _out_ with him?’ said Freya, in a sort of incredulous squeak.

I have no idea, thought Arya. ‘I am going to smash your fucking teeth in,’ she said, and Freya looked extremely alarmed.

‘Nah, fam fam fam, not tonight,’ said Pyp, putting his hands out, going all gang-peacemaker. ‘Be kind, Arya. It’s for charity, you get me?’

Arya stared at Freya. 

Freya mumbled something. 

‘Say what?’ said Arya, and cocked her head.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Freya said, slightly more loudly. ‘I didn’t know you liked him. Please don’t smash my teeth in. I’m having braces next week. ’

Arya felt a strange rush of calm wash over her as she watched Podrick coming back towards them. She didn’t have to bitch out and assault people. Not every time. ‘You are safe. For _now_ ,’ she said and Freya sagged with relief before Pyp pulled her away to dance. 

Podrick handed her a coloured plastic cup with some sort of multicoloured fruit cocktail. Arya looked at it. ‘Don’t suppose you have anything any stronger?’ she said.

He shook his head, a grin wider than she had seen for a while. 

***

What with Arya’s useless foot, they mostly hung out next to each other in the corner, talking to other people. She was utterly aware of the warmth of Podrick’s thigh pressing against hers. Jojen sloped up to join them for a bit, looking from under his eyebrows at the dancefloor with a very French-noir sense of ennui, before Arya cheered him up by pointing out Ms. Sand and Mr. Martell, who seemed to have manipulated Mr. Baratheon into a corner and were talking very earnestly to him with graphically-demonstrative hand gestures, whilst he looked rather alarmed.

Sandor Clegane was in the corner with Bronn the groundsman, not very subtly passing a hipflask between them. He slid it in his back pocket as Arya approached. 

‘Mr. Lannister will do you for that,’ she said.

‘For what?’ Sandor said, looking steadfastly over her head. His eyes still looked puffy from Aunt Lysa’s air freshener-attack.

‘You stink of brandy.’

‘Do not.’

‘He stinks of something,’ said Bronn, in his light Yorkshire tones, eyeing Arya with amusement.

Sandor gave a dark, tangled scowl, looking past her again. ‘Kissed and made up?’ 

Arya looked over her shoulder, to where Podrick was talking to the pink-haired girl - who it turned out was a physics nerd and only a friend, thank fuck. It was pretty easy to tell by the way he was looking over at Arya about every one and a half seconds.

‘Maybe.’

‘My advice worked, then.’ He folded his arms and glared down at her.

She folded her arms, or did as best she could with the crutch.

‘How’s the foot?’

‘Getting there.’ She glanced up at him. ‘Thanks.’

Arya swore that for a second Sandor’s eyes went a little softer. But it was probably just the brandy. ‘Aye, well next time you fucking bash yourself in, don’t expect me to come calling. Your aunt’s a bloody madwoman.’

She grinned again. ‘Have a nice night, fuckface.’ She turned before he could insult her back.

As she crossed the dancefloor, there was a gentle tap on her shoulder. She turned to find Tommen, looking a little furtive and out of breath from a solid hour of jumping up and down.

‘Hey, Tommen.’

‘Um, hello. Have you seen Jojen anywhere?’

‘Why?’ 

Tommen seemed to glance over towards his grandfather, who was looking around the hall with a finely-honed mixture of benevolence and malice. ‘Um, no reason.’ There was a sunrisey flush to his cheeks.

Bollocks. Well, Arya’s day was going pretty well. She couldn’t really begrudge Jojen some success. She would eat his cum-encrusted pants if she had to. ‘He’s probably having another smoke. Round the back of the car park.’

Tommen’s face illuminated, a conversion of five hundred joules in two seconds. ‘Thanks!’ He bounded off, before slowing down and going a bit more carefully as he passed Mr. Lannister.

***

Arya found her way back to Podrick, feeling very visible and incredibly juveline hanging out with him next to his friends, trying not to care. Fuck it. He’d brought _her_.

Podrick leant down to her. ‘Do you want to get out of here?’ His mouth touched her earlobe as he spoke and she swore she got a little direct current of electricity right through her spine.

‘Yeah?’

‘I thought you might like to go to something in town instead.’

She pulled back a bit to look at him. ‘Like what?’

‘You’ll see.’

She nodded, and he took her hand and led her through the hall. Sandor shook his head at her as if she was a total no-hoper and she stuck her tongue out at him. And two fingers.

They turned the corner and ran straight into Mr. Lannister, who had made no concession to the evening’s festivities and was clad in his usual sackcloth-coloured, perfectly-fitted suit and handkerchief, crisply triangled in his pocket.

They dropped each other’s hands.

His eyes alighted on one, then the other. ‘Miss Stark. Podrick.’

She didn’t really know why he called her by her last name and not Podrick.

‘Hello, sir,’ they both said, though Arya’s was more cheery and Podrick’s a little more worried-sounding.

Mr. Lannister stood, hands behind his back, gazing at them both, his eyebrows like the wings of eagles. Talons probably coming out at any second. Arya shifted from one foot to the either. Tried to keep her face very guileless. 

‘Well done,’ he said, two words like daggers slid under the skin, and she couldn’t tell whether he meant about the exams, or about the two of them together, which hopefully wasn’t too obvious. And he moved slowly away, a grand tiger moving back to the shadows to feast on the deer that he had eaten the arse off earlier.

Arya and Podrick looked at each other. Grinned, though Podrick rather more with relief than anything further. He took her hand again, and they left the bright school lights and pogo-ing students and went out into the cold slice of darkness to wait for their taxi.

Jojen was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Tommen, come to think of it.

***

After that, Podrick didn’t really let go of her hand in the cab, or along Redkeep Street, or in the queue for the club he seemed to be taking her to (he seemed to know that she would have fake ID), or in the cloakroom queue, or at the bar. His hand felt excellent. It also felt excellent on her back as he steered her to a railing next to the dancefloor, which was full of people with their arms up.

It was a crashing, massive, heart-thumping noise and it was amazing. Podrick yelled in her ear that this was DJ Hodor, over from Northern Ireland, who was a bit like one of the DJs she’d said she liked, but more underground.

‘I can’t dance,’ she shouted after two tunes.

‘Nor can I,’ he shouted back. 

‘Yeah, but you have to anyway,’ she said. And she pushed him out onto the floor in front of her and watched him jump around whilst she drank both of their beers. He had taken his suit jacket off and his waistcoat, but kept the skinny tie on and rolled his sleeves up. He wasn’t lying about not really being able to dance, but it was pretty fucking adorable.

The DJ, who looked part-giant, kept doing this thing where he would put a drop in the record and put his hand to his ear and everyone would shout ‘HODOR!’ very loudly.

She shouted ‘HODOR!’ three times before Podrick came bouncing back up, the edges of his hair totally sweaty, and his eyes sparking with the lights. His momentum took them both backwards to the nearest wall, and she could feel the heat of him through his hands on her sides as he looked at her, and she thought _fucking hell you are hot and hench and dench, dame fucking judi dench_ as their mouths met. 

Arya wondered why they hadn’t done this before, the serious proper snogging, but mostly she was just thinking _wow tongue wow_ and DJ Hodor threw some laser-beats at them and through them and stuck them together even more. She put a hand round his slightly sweaty neck and the other held the waistline of his trousers and it didn’t matter that her toe hurt and she kissed his fucking face off.

Twenty minutes later, Arya pulled away, feeling like her mouth had been beaten up. In a good way. Podrick did a sort of sexy, sticky, sleepy blink. 

‘Can we go back to yours?’ she shouted in his ear, her hand still on his collar, touching the damp skin at his neck.

He nodded. A little smile.

‘Can we have sex again?’ she shouted, and his smile became wider.

***

Arya woke up on her side wearing a t-shirt of his and no pants. Her head had been steamrolled, or lawnmowered, or maybe steamrolled and then lawnmowered. 

Podrick was lying next to her on his back, and his face was almost exactly the same as when he was awake. The same plain, tranquil sort of thing, only with a hilarious little whistling noise as he breathed out. She lifted the duvet a bit. He was wearing nothing at all.

The light was fingering its way through the curtains. Fingering was about right. 

Her phone buzzed and she slid over a little, fingers fumbling around on the floor for her clothes until she found it and Jojen’s message. 

_where u get off to last night_

Arya thought about taking a picture of Podrick - or certain parts of Podrick - and decided to keep them for herself, just now. 

She typed back. _Town then Pods_. There wasn’t really an emoji for what she needed to follow that with.

_Bella/bello_

_did tommen find u_

_mmm_

_need more dan dat_

_MMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmMMMMM_

She began to fill her entire phone with emojis to convey both the hilarity and excellence of both of their situations when she heard the stairs creak and Uncle Ilyn move downstairs. Podrick shifted and opened his eyes.

Arya dropped her phone onto the floor and lay back. ‘Hello.’

He looked like he had slept for a thousand years, or maybe just a minute. Just totally Podrick. ‘Hello.’ A little dimple at the edge of his cheek.

She looked at him with one eye shut. ‘Do you think he heard us?’

He raised his eyebrows in a sort of shrug. ‘Don’t know. Might have heard you.’ He smiled again.

They were both lying very still. ‘You can’t blame that on me,’ she said. ‘That was entirely your fault.’ He had gone down on her again, and this time she had totally come, and then they had had proper sex, and she had totally come again. And he had. Penis-made-orgasm slam-dunk. She grinned again.

He gazed at her, and she wondered how on earth she hadn’t just fallen headlong into his eyes the first time he looked at her, trying to forget that it was probably the suit, and the laptop, and the undying love of physics. His eyes were basically the best ingredient that anyone could ever hope to use on Bake-Off. She should go on it and use them as her secret weapon.

Podrick was suddenly full of movement, stretching and turning onto his side and pulling her into him – with a minor awkwardness as they tried to work out whose elbows went where – and it truly felt ruder having only a t-shirt on than being starkers. 

This was awesome. She would not yet worry about the shitstorm that would be Aunt Lysa. She would focus on the way that their legs were interlocking and how warm he was, warmer than tungsten (boom, she thought, mentally high-fiving herself), and how he was two years older than her, which made her very cool, and how his hand was partly resting on her completely naked arse.

After a while, Arya put her chin on his chest and looked up at him. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ 

‘Is it about sublimation?’ he said.

She shook her head. 

‘Then yes.’

It wasn’t about sublimation. Or electrolysis. Or fractional distillation. Or kinetic particle theory and state changes. Instead, Arya asked Podrick the dorkiest question that she had uttered in the whole time she had spent with him, and hoped that he knew the answer.

‘Can I be your girlfriend?’ she said.

There was the sound of 1970s rock and roll downstairs and a cupboard door slamming. A car turning outside. 

He looked at her, and smiled, and nodded. 

**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PICSET! Linkable [here](http://i.imgur.com/lZrchHu.jpg).
> 
> **PROFESSOR SWIMMINGFOX'S BRITISH SLANG NOTES** :
> 
> sick = good, awesome, amazing, etc  
> blud = like bredren; brother, friend etc  
> snogging = lengthy, fabulously lovely kissing  
> starkers = naked
> 
> This has been my favourite fanfic to write EVER! (Even though hardly anyone has read it! APART FROM YOU FABULOUS HARDCORE COMMENTERS WHOM I GIVE ALL MY LOVE TO). So I have already written a short SanSan sequel, ahaha. Stay tuned.


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